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Video Levels In After Effects 7
Hi! My first post! yay!
Ok, so here’s the deal…
My manager will edit a spot on his FCP box and then ship it over to our AE box in the graphics department so that the graphic artist can do their thing to it. (this is a broadcast news station). The problem we are having is that everything he sends ends up having hotter video levels by about 10% once it hits after effects 7. We tried it on 6.5 and didn’t have the same result.
Needless to say it’s causing problems becuase things end up blown out.Is this a bug in 7 or is that a preference that we’re overlooking?
I’m open to any and all ideas!!
Ok, go cow’s! 🙂
Thanks very much in advance,
Kip -
5 Replies
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Well FCP works in YUV color (16 to 255 in 8 bit) and AE only works in RGB (0 – 255 in 8 bit). So depending on how you’re getting your video in and out there may be level shifts. I usually render out of FCP into an RGB codec like Quicktime Animation at millions of colors/best quality. FCP should convert the levels for you. Then it will be in RGB land thru AE and Back then hopefully get rerendered back to YUV levels in FCP. However I haven’t done this since using AE7. But my point is that it’s 2 different color spaces and if there isn’t a proper conversion, there will be level shifts. If nothing else, you will have to fix it manually by using levels in AE to bring the blacks back down to 0 and the whites back up to max.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Make sure you set your project color space properly. Not having rthe right color profiles in place can be a problem.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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how do we match color profiles from FCP to AE7?
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I’m not really up to speed on what goes on in the Mac world as I so rarely see and use one these days, but you should either use the basic Adobe RGB profile if you have no calibration on your system at all or use one of the footage relavant profiles for standard PAL or NTSC levels if you have calibrated your FCP along ith your video hardware. While it may not entirely eliminate the color shifts, it should give less trouble. If that’s not enough, you can always forcibly make your levels compliant by applying some of the techniques described in Aharon’s video on broadcast safe colors.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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You can’t match color spaces in one or the other since they are in different color space mode natively. Metaphorically speaking, One app is Betamax and one app is VHS you can never change one to the other. You can however make a VHS dub of your beta material and work in VHS. Then dub back for final posting.
/metaphor mode off
Someone above made the best suggestion, you render out an uncompressed RGB file from FCP to move to AE7. Once you are done in AE7 you render out a new YUV file to bring into FCP.
This should give you the same colors in all versions. When you don’t convert them yourself. AE7 and FCP try to do their own conversions and don’t do it intelligently.
Eome apps want black is 0,0,0 in RGB
Other apps want black as “Set up” and will be usually cranked up 7.5% to 16,16,16
Often it will convert from YUV to RGB or RGB to YUV and “set up” again. and add the 7.5% again.Exporting as the color space that is native for the app will let you fix any mistakes that the app makes when automatically converting from rgb to yuv/yuv to rgb.
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