[Brian Paterson]

Many Thanks Rafael,
I am trying to do as you say but I have hit one little problem which you might be able to help me with.

Instead of just outputting a self contained quicktime file in a pro res format, I actually would prefer to re-render the whole timeline in a pro res format ( in case I decide to make some last minute changes ) and when completely satisfied just output a reference file to use in iDVD. ( which is quick to do )

However as I do not have enough space on the external drive I am using then I need to have final cut send the new render files to a different external drive, (which I have cleared space on.)

I thought I was doing this when using the media manager but after 18 hours it seems it has only placed a folder in the other external drive with a whole new set of pro res clips in and has not rendered the original timeline which still need rendering now it has finished. ( which of course I can’t do as i don’t have enough space)

So having changed the sequence settings to pro res, how do I actually re-render the timeline and have the new render files go to the other external hard drive with more space on.)

Normally i would select the drive, scratch disc and render folder etc at the log and transfer stage but how do I change this afterwards.?

I’m sure it must be easy but just can’t find the answer.

Many Thanks
BRIAN.

brian paterson

[Brian Paterson]

Thanks Raphael,
To do this I needed more space so use the media manager in FCP to select a different external drive.

I had not used this before and it’s interesting to see what the size of the new file will be before I begin to render in the Prores format. The original file was 108 gigabytes and the new one would be 168 gigabytes. However with the ‘Render in high Precision YUV’ turned on as you suggest the file size is 198 gigabytes.
As a larger file will need more compression to fit on a standard DVD and more compression means less quality then is it really worth using the high precision option. Will one not just cancel out the other. ?
It is going to take 18 hours to render in high precision.

I tried doing a 1 minute test late last night which took nearly an hour for each version and really had to struggle to see any difference.
In the end I just went for the full render as you suggest but now I am unsure if that will ultimately produce the best finished product.

brian paterson

[Brian Paterson]

Clint,
Of course you cannot possibly put out a signal customized for every display that’ll see it. That is why a little adjustment in the camera would help.

Currently my monitor has good natural greys and whites. I could adjust this to make it more yellow to match the Sony but then the grey’s and the whites look horrible so it would be far simpler to tweak the LCD screen so I can see like for like. It is not going to make any difference to anything other than make my life easier because I will still edit on the same screen and colour grade the final ouput as I do now. I don’t know why you can’t get your head around that and if you believe I am outputting my colours wrongly whilst thinking what I see on my computer to be perfect then please check out a couple of my very short trailers on your calibrated monitor and tell me how far out you think they are. ( you can check me out at https://vimeo.com/41606469 or for a none wedding film with more natural colours https://vimeo.com/37430634 – It would be nice to get an opinion from an expert.

Regarding “Snooty”- that might be the wrong word, what I really meant was that a lot of the forum experts seem to talk down to their audience by saying you can’t possibly do this or that without this piece of equipment or that piece of equipment, as if it grow on trees. However we don’t all come from a world where this sort of equipment is affordable or lying around in abundance at our friends places.
I am not so stupid that I don’t know the benefit of having a calibrated monitor and if I could afford one I would not be writing in to ask you if I could tweak the LCD. Instead I would be writing in to ask you about information on Calibrated monitors.
My original question was to ask if there was an adjustment in the ex1 to tweak the colour of the LCD screen. After all Sony have provided three of the elements to adjust the gamma so why not the fourth.

I have had meetings with teams of expert from Barco in the past when I owned one of their monitors and their theories are all very well. But in the end all the waffle and technical dissection of colour amounts to nothing if you can’t “see” it and “feel” it.

BRIAN PATERSON.

brian paterson

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[Brian Paterson]

What I edit and colour grade using my Mac always seems to look great on a large LCD or Plasma Screen. I don’t have a problem with that. However I do post wedding trailers online which are viewed on all sorts of bog standard none calibrated computers and they still look great as far as I have seen. ( you can check me out at https://vimeo.com/41606469 or for a none wedding film with more natural colours https://vimeo.com/37430634 – something I did for fun but with all the same equipment I use for a wedding. If you think my colours a way out then please let me know. By the way I do not make a living from film making either. I probably only do four or five weddings a year as they are so badly paid. Hence there is no money for an external monitor and I am still struggling to pay off the camera. You must know some well off people if they all have the luxury of external monitors. Some of us are struggling just to pay the mortgage.

Yes I realise you can set picture profiles, of which I have about six set up, but that function cannot make independent adjustments to the LCD. The colour of that profile will still be different when I see it on my computer by exactly the same degree of difference that already exists between the camera and my Mac. As I said you can set contrast brightness and saturation in the LCD settings but not Hue as far as I can see. I will also repeat for the umteenth time it would be helpful if I could adjust the hue ( maybe by reducing the yellow just a little ) to match my monitor as ultimately it is that monitor I will end up using to do the grading. Right now I know that the footage will come out a bit more yellow but by how much is always an unknown. I could alter my monitor but have spent quite a bit of time setting it up to reflect the accuracy of the print work I do for a living so I do not want to upset that balance.
I suppose I could make a separate profile and save the settings to call up when editing videos and I may yet do that but this whole thread started with just a simple question which was, – does anyone know if I there is something I missed in the camera’s settings that can alter the gamma of the LCD on an Ex1. That is all I wanted to know. As yet I have not had a Yes ( or a no ) but I guess the answer is- NO !

Maybe one day i’ll win the lottery and buy that professional monitor to see how accurate Sony’s settings really are.

Thanks for discussing this
With Regards BRIAN PATERSON.

brian paterson

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[Brian Paterson]

Thanks Michael,
That’s very kind of you. I have a lot of experience over they years in calibrating monitors, mainly for print purposes but I will look into this in relation to the Sony. My initial post was simply posing the question as to whether there was something hidden in the menu settings I had missed which would enable me to tweak the LCD colour but obviously there is not. At least knowing that I can start to plan a way around it.
Many thanks for everyone’s help and invigorating discussions on the subject.

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas at this time of the year.

Regards
BRIAN PATERSON.

brian paterson

[Brian Paterson]

THanks,
I don’t work in the TV world.
I produce wedding videos and post them on the internet. That is where people view them. On computer monitors. Probably not as good as the one I have in most cases. That said do I understand what you are trying to say but then why does the EX1 have contrast, brightness and saturation adjustment if it has a “fair” adjustment built in as you say. Why not add colour temperature as well.
This camera is great up to a point but it is aimed at the lower end of the budget spectrum where people who would buy this would not have all the expensive monitoring equipment that TV companies would have so we have to compensate and make the best of what we’ve got. The ability to match colours to our “cheap” monitors would go a long way to helping us see so we are not guessing at what is going to come out. I am not talking of massive amounts, but just to be able to tweak here and there to taste would help. Nobody is going to force the user to ignore Sony’s setting but to have the choice would be good.
At the end of the day it’s all going to be colour graded to what I see on my screen anyhow so I might as well have the ability to set the lcd to match my screen in the first place and save a lot of extra work in post after the event.
Your comments seem to be in line with most professionals who have all the expensive equipment and who look down their noses and lecture the rest of us from their exalted positions.

Try to appreciate what the rest of us have to work with and not only from your own perspective.

Many Thanks

BRIAN PATERSON.

brian paterson

[Brian Paterson]

HI Michael,
Thanks for the reply however we all have to make the best of what equipment we have ( or can afford ) there is no way on earth I can afford a Professional External monitor so I have to work with the screen I have on my Mac. If it is good enough for good accurate professional print proofing then I can’t see it will be that far out for producing wedding footage on DVD and in fact I don’t see a lot of difference ( if any ) between the footage on my screen after I have edited and colour graded it and the picture I get on my TV when I play the finished DVD. In fact I just made my first Blu Ray and was amazed at the quality all round. So all the rest I can control and can trust, however the bit that is always a guessing game is what the colours are going to come out like after I do the shoot. They might look great on the camera LCD but that is no guarantee they will look the same when I get back home. If I could adjust the LCD to match the gamma on my Mac, then me, my camera and my mac would at least be reading from the same script. It dosen’t matter if it’s correct just as long as it is the same.
I don’t know how many times I have to say that or why it is not sinking in. You say you would never reply on a computer screen for an accurate picture. Well what about all the wedding trailers and other stuff presented to clients online. Are they not looking at the material on a computer screen.? I make a lot of stuff on a computer for people who are going to view it on a computer and many do the same. The theory of colour and all the talk between the geeks and the so called professionals is mainly bunkum. We all see colour differently anyhow but we will never know how the other person sees it. Sure it’s necessary to have standards and all that stuff but to people who just want to be wowed by great colour the different of a shade or two means nothing just as long as it looks great. I have worked with colour for 45 years and have developed a pretty good eye for it. Every application I have at my disposal allows me to tweak the colour to my liking except this LCD screen and I’m damed if I am going to adjust every other thing I own to match up to that one screen, because frankly I don’t trust it and there is no way it is ever going to allow me to test it so it seems.
Many Thanks for your reply.

BRIAN PATERSON.

brian paterson

[Brian Paterson]

Thanks Jw, but can we please stick to the original question which was: Is there any way to adjust the colour of the flip out screen on an EX1. – Not the contrast, not the brightness, not the saturation. – Just the colour.

Regarding the other issue you raise about Mac Sceens being too yellow it all depends how you set up the gamma on them. As I said in my original post, I send a lot of high quality artwork to print and the resulting work is pretty true to what I see on the screen. However the point I was trying to make is that I would like to be able to match the colour of the EX1’s LCD screen to the colour I see on my Mac.
– Not the other way around. At least that way when I film something and I choose a picture profile in the camera that I like the look of I am not then going to get something so completely different when I get back home and begin the edit. I don’t see why that is so difficult to understand yet people bang on an on about colour balanced monitors. I used to run a company reproducing fine art greetings cards and we used the same printer that the top museums used. We wasted hours and hours every month discussing the accuracy of the original to their print. In the end I gave up quibbling about small differences and just went with the mantra ” If it looks great , it is great.” because really it makes no difference if it looks marginally yellow or blue as long as it’s not way way off and nasty to look at. However most important thing in those days was for me to see what I was going to be sending to the printer. Or at least knowing what he was going to see when he recieved it. So when I scanned a transparency into my computer and brought it into photoshop it had to reflect the same colours on screen as the original and this was then checked against the printing proofs before going on the press. So the colours were all the same all the way through. Otherwise if I couldn’t match the colours up then how would i know which was correct. What I want with the LCD is a simpler version of what I just described . I just want to match the LCD to what I see on my computer screen. Is that so much to ask without going into all the technicalities of colour theories. No I don’t think so. So if anyone knows whether what I am asking is possible ( or not possible ) please let me know.

Many Thanks
BRIAN PATERSON.

brian paterson

[Brian Paterson]

Hi Michael thanks for your reply, the only adjustments there seems to be are for Contrast, Brightness and Saturation. However none of these affect the gamma, i.e. the warmth or coolness of the colours.
Is there actually anything that you know of which will do this or am I wasting my time searching for something in the settings which dosen’t actually exist.

I have looked at the picture profile settings as well and tried everything but as far as I can see these settings have nothing to do with altering the temperature of the LCD screen on it’s own.

So how can I match up the LCD screen to the temperature of the image I see on my computer.

I don’t think a professional external monitor has anything to do with this scenario. What I simply want is to be able to see on the LCD screen what I will eventually see on my computer when I ingest the footage. Easily done by matching the colours to each other. If they are both wrong or both right it makes no difference just as long as they are the same and I can see in the LCD screen the image as it will appear in my computer. At least if they match I have a fighting chance rather than trying to guess how much more blue or red the image will come out at after I have eight hours of footage to edit, (and consequently to colour correct if I have guessed wrong. )

Hopefully there is a way somehow but i’m not banking on it.

Regards BRIAN.

brian paterson

[Brian Paterson]

Hi Daniel,
Thanks for clarifying things. Especially the H.264 / MPEG4 situation.

My apologies for causing confusion as to whether it was DVD or Blu Ray I was talking about. My whole series of posts were an attempt to discover a best working practice, from finishing an edit in FCP through to producing a Blu Ray disc with Chapters and Menus. However once I had fathomed out all of this I was still left with the dilemma of which Blu Ray discs to buy to guarantee quality, archival longevity and compatibility with the many players out there.

Whilst I was waiting for my chosen BD discs to arrive I decided to make a test of my menus by burning the project to DVD and had read so many times about how easy it was to do do that – for example some “expert” wrote ( ” just go to Project Settings and change the checkbox from Blu-ray to DVD and that should do it – Encore converts it all for you.” )
Obviously this is not quite the whole truth and I guess that’s why all the transcoding had to be done.
However everything seemed O.K. so now I have made the blu Ray version which this time didn’t have to do all the transcoding and was much quicker taking one and a half hours to write 20 gigabyte of data plus 1hr building a disc image.

The question now is should I bring that disc image into”Toast” and burn the BD discs from there as I would normally do with a DVD or can I ( and should I ) use the disc image to burn the BD discs from Encore. With toast it is a simple drag and drop and burn but I don’t know about Encore as yet. Presumably the quality should be the same from both as the authoring has already been done and I am therefore only making copies of what already exists. Is this correct ?

Thanks to everyone for their contributions. In my initiation into BD authoring I have read and watched many different and sometimes conflicting ways of doing this. Like everything these days there are big learning curves and hoops to jump through at every turn. It has taken a lot of time and research but I think I can now go forward with more confidence and take what I know onto the next stage with motion menus and such like. It’s easy when you know how, but getting the know how has not been easy.

With Regards- BRIAN.

P.S This project takes nearly half an hour to open in Encore. Is this related to the size of the file. ? ? ?

brian paterson