wrong colours in export from FCP

[Andrew Kimery]

If you aren’t looking at your footage on a calibrated broadcast monitor you don’t know what it looks like. You can’t get an accurate representation by looking at it on a computer monitor and you can’t get an accurate representation of it by looking at it inside FCP (which only shows a guesstimated gamma adjusted proxy image). If you compare the footage in QT Player to the footage in FCP it will look different, because QT Player and FCP don’t display w/the same way, unless you’ve gone into the QT preferences and checked the box that basically says “display the video the same way FCP does.” The Finder preview may or many not be effected by that check box, I don’t know. Currently Apple does not have a uniform way to display video across the entire platform but hopefully that changes w/the next big OS upgrade.

Also there is an h.264 bug in QT that will cause a gamma shift in the exported video. A work around can be found here:
https://provideocoalition.com/index.php/aadams

Just scroll down until you see “QuickTime Conundrum”.

-A

3.2GHz 8-core, FCP 6.0.4, 10.5.5
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (6.8.1)

[Dennis Couzin]

Anette, a really scary aspect of video is the dependence on the player and the display. In my little experiment I found the QuickTime player was playing a silly game with DV-PAL video, raising its gamma by 10%. In fact, the colors in the DV were not significantly different from those in the uncompressed exports, as shown when they were all converted to a common codec.

Use of a calibrated reference monitor gives a false confidence of “correctness”, since it ignores what the real audience of viewers will see. I’d rather have an array (actual or simulated) of realistic monitors, so I can judge whether the colors I make will look OK most of the time. (It is a new and interesting artistic problem to have to make “robust” pictures which look good regardless of player and display.)

Untold engineers have stuck their fingers into each step of the video chain. This makes an impossible task for anyone wishing to get to the bottom of things. The color aspects of video taking, capture, editing, and display are an engineering patchwork, a valiant try at making everything work with everything. Video, including broadcasting, carries too much practical baggage to be fully scientific.

Concerning RGB and Y’CrCb. We mustn’t forget that all cameras physically operate in the first system, that video is generally coded in the second system, and that all monitors and projectors physically operate in the second system. So early there has to be a RGB->Y’CrCb conversion and late there has to be a Y’CrCb->RGB conversion. The formulae for the first conversion should be based on the physical color characteristics of the camera. The formulae for the last conversion should be based on the physical color characteristics of the display device. Are they? How is FCP making such conversions, since it doesn’t “know” either physical device? Also each conversion should go to extra data bits to avoid rounding errors. Do they?

[David Roth weiss]

[Anette Ruud Andersen] “Here is my material: 1280×720 – 25p – compressor:(default) xdcam ex 720p25. What is the best setting for colours for my material?
“

Here’s a very simple recipe for you Anette that will yield a very nice h.264 QT.

First, always export a self contained Quicktime using Export>>Quicktime Movie at current settings. That creates a QT file that is identical to your timeline in every way. That is your very best export possible. Of course, it is too large for the Web, so now you use that file in Compressor to encode Web videos.

Next, import into Compressor and use the Apple>>Quicktime>H.264 preset, and change the size to whatever you need for the web in the Geometry tab if the Inspector, and in the Filter tab check Gamma Correction and adjust the setting from the default of 1.0 to 1.20.

Hit submit and wait a while, and you should soon have a very decent Web video.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Anette Ruud andersen]

Hi david,
Thank you for the input and advice. I tend to use h264 a lot. I really think the h264 gives a very nice image.

[Howard Ferguson]

Hi David, and All,

I’m hoping you will have tips for me.

I am also currently encountering this problem of color shifting from the work in Final Cut Pro, to the Exported copy.

My Exports are being displayed in Quicktime 7.2, on a MacBook Pro Santa Rosa 2.4 Ghz, in OS 10.4.11.
Generated from Final Cut Version 5.1.4.

Details from the Browser on a specific problem clip are:

Vid Rate is 23.98
Compressor is DV/DVCPRO-NT
Data Rate is 2.9
16-bit Integer
Alpha is None/Ignore
Composite is Normal
Pixel Aspect is NSC-CCIR 601
Field Dominance is None

The Quicktime Movie Export (Self-Contained), set to the Sequence settings- and with no compression,
does not provide an accurate color copy of the original.

Instead, it is washed out, pale.
At times it is very different from the original I’ve been working with in Final Cut.

All on the same hardware and software, booted from an external RAID.

All help with this very very welcome !

Thanks !

Howard Ferguson
Chicago

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Howard,
Open the QT Preferences and check “Allow compatibility with FC Colors”.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Ollie Jacobsen]

great thanks I had this same problem and all it was only a little check box hidden in quicktime! Awesome