Problem with CC for feature doc

[Vuk Vukmirovic]

First, THANK YOU ALL FOR HELPING!

[Shane Ross] “SO…how can you fix this? Change your sequence settings to PRORES 422. Go into the SEQUENCE menu and choose SETTINGS. Change the COMPRESSOR to ProRes 422. Render. Well, remove all your filters, and then render. Export a self contained QT file. FILE>EXPORT>QUICKTIME MOVIE. Check SELF CONTAINED, and SEQUENCE SETTINGS. This will give you a single, ProRes file. Now, you can either bring that back into FCP, chop it up on the cut points and color correct that, or bring that to a PC Adobe setup and do the same.”

As I wrote in the first post I already done this, a bit differently, but still…I removed all the filters and copied footage to sequences: HDV video to an HDV settings sequence, JVC video to XDCAM sequence, left the DSLR in H264 sequence… and export the QT self contained with current settings. Then I took these files and put it in Compressor to get TIFF image sequences for PC and on first look they all looked fine. When the DP compared the original MP4 from JVC and the exported one I gave him, the image is much darker from the original. He couldn’t compare the HDV as he doesn’t have the original and I’m still waiting for him to compare the DSLR footage. Do you think it could make a difference doing it with ProRes?

[Shane Ross] “Yes, you do have that option. If you have Thunderbolt”

This is not the newest iMac, but a version from some years ago, so I’m not sure if it has Thunderbolt, but main problem is production, we don’t have a budget for anything else. Anyway, I will try to get rid of H264 footage and sequences and export a test with CC filters.

[Spencer Averick]

[Vuk Vukmirovic] “Yes, it was set to H264 as most video is from DSLR. “
Both H.264 and HDV really suck in FCP. Always always transcode to ProRes before bringing in to the project and then always keep your sequence compressor set at that same flavor of ProRes.

[Vuk Vukmirovic] “[Spencer Averick] “Try setting that to ProResHQ in FCP and do a test export to see how it looks”

I can do that, but will this help fix a problem of “one image in the viewer, the other in exported image”?
“

Yes, the canvas/timeline in FCP isn’t going to be accurate (although set your canvas to 100% and see how that looks (It will be more true, but not as true as a ref monitor).
Also, the exported image will be far closer to reality than inside FCP.

This is a bit messy, I can’t really speak to the PPro workaround, but if I were you I think I would go back to my original OFFLINE sequence, set the compressor setting to ProRes422, render everything for a few hours in the timeline. Then start your color correcting in FCP with the 3-way filter. As you go, export full res test clips that have been cc’d and see how they look in QT player. Then maybe compress that for DVD and up the data rate a bit, see how it looks on a tv. The dvd compression will never be as good as the full res QT, that’s why if this screens in a theater it won’t be from a dvd, rather an hdcam or even straight from the full res QT.

[Joseph Owens]

[Vuk Vukmirovic] ” and export the QT self contained with current settings. Then I took these files and put it in Compressor to get TIFF image sequences for PC and on first look they all looked fine. When the DP compared the original MP4 from JVC and the exported one I gave him, the image is much darker from the original. “

I ran into something like this a couple of years ago with a client who wanted to keep everything “uncompressed”. First off, “uncompressed” is still compressed, in some way.

I was roundtripping all this material through Apple COLOR at the time, and everything wound up with a big scaling error in both directions, because, as it turned out, the RGB files that the client had exported (under Windows) were not being interpreted correctly under Apple Quicktime, and were being described as Compression: None. The effect was that 64-940 was being interpreted as 0-1023, and chaos ensued. This might be happening with your TIFF sequences, which is a workflow as dangerous, space-consuming, and time wasting as it can get. Even a hard drive manufacturer warned me that NTFS and MacOS partitions, especially where 10-bit “uncompressed” files are concerned, may have interchange issues.

It is not for nothing that people who have a lot of chaotic data-types thrown at them want to see everything consolidated into a single, easy to handle, lossless codec. The Final Cut suite was practically designed to be ProRes-centric — use it! Premiere Pro should be able to handle it, Adobe brags about how codec agnostic they are. As far as display rendition goes, the debate has been raging for years on the colorgrade forums about whether it is possible to use graphics monitors for color correction. They can not.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Nick Meyers]

oh, yeah.. the de-interlacing.

you can do that in FCP very well with Nattress Smart De-Interlace
of course you wont be able to see what you are doing with it!
i tend to keep tolerance very low between minimum (2) and 10
blending off, or zero.

nick

[Vuk Vukmirovic]

I want to thank all for your help and write what I think/hope will be a conclusion.
The bad CC in FCP was definitely a product of H.264 sequence settings. I don’t know why does FCP let you make these settings, if it doesn’t work good… Anyway, even the CC was now acceptable, the DP wasn’t satisfied, so he insisted to have a TIFF sequence on a PC. That brings me to the problem of underexposed TIFFs that you get from FCP and/or Compressor. From what I read, this gamma shift can only be bypassed with a manual gamma shift in the export settings, so this is what I did. First I exported QT from FCP with Current Settings for all the camera formats separately, with sequences matching camera formats. The exception was with H.264 files which I put in Apple ProRes 4:2:2 HQ sequence, so that’s the video file that I got. From these QTMs I exported TIFF image sequences in Compressor, where I manually adjusted gamma to 0.82 and got correctly exposed images. Don’t know if I “lost” something with this, but that’s the only thing I found as a solution. At the end, I had one other problem. All the TIFFs were fine except these from Apple ProRes 4:2:2 HQ. They were fine too, but they had 16 bit color depth which PPro doesn’t read, so they couldn’t be imported there. I didn’t find where I could manually adjust this in Compressor export settings and I didn’t have time for any more experiments, so I ended up making an action in Photoshop changing all the TIFFs in 8bit. Hopefully this will be the end of my agony…
Just one more question, what is the best option for an uncompressed format exported from PPro and importing again in FCP7? Or maybe is the best thing to finish everything now on the PC?