Preserving Superwhites, 100-108 range

[Richard Sanchez]

Under your Sequence Settings, go to the “Video Processing” Tab and change the “Process Maximum White” pulldown from White to Super White. You’ll also want to set it to Render as 10-bit in the same window.

Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks

[Charles Taylor]

No dice… Sorry.

[Arnie Schlissel]

Charles, how are you exporting? I find that when I export footage from FCP in its native format with out recompressing it, all of it’s original information is maintained.

you should be exporting by using File:Export:Quicktime Movie, not File:Export:Using Quicktime Conversion.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Charles Taylor]

Yes, that’s true. I was hoping that there’s a way to preserve super whites through my whole pipeline, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. What I’ve got is an edited sequence in FCP – I was hoping that I could pick out the VFX shots, export them with no handles (edit is locked), do VFX, bring them back into FCP, then do the color work in Color.

So, I was hoping to export the clips as UC 10bit to maintain everything intact through the whole pipeline (I prefer doing 10 bit even when I started with 8 bit, so that the CC goes a little smoother).

What I’m doing now is doing the CC (because Color can seemingly export UC 10bit footage with superwhites), sending back to FCP and going to VFX (because at this point, it doesn’t matter so much about superwhites as they’re going to be clipped off for broadcast).

If Apple doesn’t fix QT and FCP, I think I’m going to lose it.

[Chris Borjis]

[Charles Taylor] “If Apple doesn’t fix QT and FCP, I think I’m going to lose it.”

I’ll start building that padded room for you. 😉

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Charles Taylor] “I was hoping that there’s a way to preserve super whites through my whole pipeline,”

Well, tell us about your pipeline. You export out of FCP with ‘cuurent settings’ and not Qt conversion, correct?

Then where do you take it to to convert to 10bit? What VFX program?

Then you being back in to FCP and then is your footage clipped or is it clipped after Color?

Please give way more info about where exactly your footage is getting truncated.

Jeremy

[Charles Taylor]

This is what I’ve tried:

Export QT Movie – to UC 10bit.
Result: Truncated

Export QT Movie – Current Settings
Import to Shake, Render to TIFF
Import to FCP
Result: Truncated

Export QT Movie – Current Settings
Import to AE
Export UC 10bit from AE
Import to FCP
Result: Truncated

What I’m doing now:

Send to Color
Do CC in float
Render to 10bit UC
Import to Shake (It will truncate at this point, but that’s fine, because the CC is done)
Do VFX
Export from Shake
Import to FCP
Go out to tape, DVD, etc.

Any other things to try? I’m thinking that when it goes through Shake, it’s going to be truncated no matter what. Urk.

[Bjørn Holmgren]

What you’re experiencing is the conversion from Y’u’v’ to RGB in QuickTime. The standard codecs have no options for level mapping, so your superwhites will get clipped when you import to Shake.
You could try the SheerVideo codec from Bitjazz, it has options for how the mapping should be done.
I just hope you still have a G5 for Shake, as 10 bit is currently broken in Shake on Intel.

[Charles Taylor]

I thought it was just 10bit out from Shake that was broken on Intel, is it import as well? I seem to recall coming out of Shake as 16bit TIFF, then rendering back to QT in AE.

(I get the feeling I’m making this complicated, but I can’t quite justify replacing Shake until it finally dies completely).

[Bjørn Holmgren]

At first it was only output, you could fix it with a Bytes node set to 8 before output. But now input is also broken.
This image shows a PAL 10 bit colorbar: