[Adam White]

Jeremy – many thanks for your input!

I thought myself that the shift would be negligible but wasn’t too sure. If I can I’ll definitely have them render out a gray scale/color bars – a great suggestion!

Which flavour of Apple ProRes do you suggest I convert the Uncompressed 10-Bit QT to? And are there any color/gamma settings I need to be aware of when converting the file?

Thanks for all your help,
Adam

[Adam White]

The only other option is ProRes 4:2:2 or 4:4:4. But this is a more problematic for them – I should add that this has been done for us as for free after I called in some favours and so we aren’t in a position to ask for more resources and/or time in all honesty.

It’s looking like Uncompressed 10-Bit is the only practical option for us at this stage (and we need this completed ASAP) so that in mind, what should I do to the file on my end with either Final Cut Pro or Color to resolve this gamma shift issue?

[Adam White]

Hey Jeremy – thanks for response.

They are grading on latest version of Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve.

Adam

[Adam White]

Sorry – should have made that clearer!

This for progressive download (i.e. Apple trailers as you say) and I’m hosting at screencast.com.

I’ve just done another test 800kbps seems to give an equally satisfactory result and gives a bit of head room so I may go with that.

[Adam White]

If you still had the image squashed then try setting your frame dimensions to 640×360 instead. Leave the aspect ratio as ‘default’ for this frame size.

YouTube is a nightmare for frame dimensions and aspect rations – I hate using it but sometimes we need to, right!

Good luck.

[Adam White]

I’ve had some difficulties exporting 16:9 material before so I know how frustrating it can be!

I now nearly always export with the following dimensions, as it works a treat every time!
– 640×480
– Pixel Aspect: 0.8000 (Custom)

Give these settings a try; they should work for you too. 640 x 480 always works well with .H264 encoder and as a general rule of thumb is a very good dimension for DV material uploaded to the internet.

There are many good sources online about compressing video for web, and about pixel aspect ratios. Unless you were good at algebra and maths at school (I never was!) it can be totally baffling.

[Adam White]

What settings are you using for this? i.e. frame controls, video dimensions e.t.c.

Take a look at this list of optimal dimensions for compressed video;
https://www.flashsupport.com/books/fvst/files/tools/video_sizes.html

That page references Flash, but I’ve always used it as a reference for H264 and these sizes always give a great image and reduce transcoding times. The trick is to use width/height dimensions that are divisible by 8 or 16 – for some reason video encoding software will always work better with these dimensions.

If your dimensions are correct, maybe there is another setting that’s causing the lag? Finally – where are your export files being sent to (i.e. FireWire HD/RAID/Internal HD)?

[Adam White]

John,

Very true!

I usually do this by default (force of habit) now so forgot to mention it!

Best,
Adam

[Adam White]

David,

Thanks for your enlightening post!

I’ve heard a bit about reference monitors, and saw a little bit about how they worked when the short film I produced was colour graded at a post-production house a few weeks back. Marvellous it was, too! I was seriously tempted to discreetly take it for myself, but general good manners do tend to inhibit one somewhat! 😉

I have tried to calibrate my iMac to be a little more representative of a standard PAL image, but to be frank I’ve no idea what I’m doing so eventually gave up and just reverted to default!

This is probably a topic for another thread altogether, so feel free to tell me where to stick this question, but are there some general, basic colour/gamma e.t.c. settings I should set my Mac to? I know about the whole 1.8/2.2 gamma issue – a bit at least – but otherwise I am embarrassingly ill informed.

Best,
Adam

[Adam White]

Bill,

It sounds to me as though this could be a problem with the incrementing suffix? Maybe try naming the capture files differently – i.e. with letters instead of numbers as suffix – and see if this error happens again?

It’s got to be a problem with the file path – that’s the only thing that makes sense, especially since all the files are in the capture folder. I would try experimenting with different file names during a capture and see what happens.

Just out of interest – did you do any software updates before this error occured?