[Emilio Martinez]

Okay, the problem is with my color bar generator.

When I pull up a color bar generator in the Viewer, also no color bars.

[Emilio Martinez]

NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT – display card;
AJA IoLA feeds Panasonic BT-LH1700WP External Monitor;
running FCP Studio 2 and QT 7.4.1.

I am seeing the problem both on the external monitor and the FCP Canvas (on my Mac).

[Emilio Martinez]

Noah, thanks for the response. I’ll have the problem even when the exposure for the rest of the shot is good — that is, my foreground will be well exposed, but I’ll have a window in the background with bright sun where it blows out white with yellow patches were there are trees, grassy hills, etc. No other colors blow-our, and I would prefer that it just all blew out white. I have used materials on windows before (like window tinting) to compress the range of light, but many times I’m shooting I can’t cover the windows (for instance, in a car dealership showroom.)

I’ve used color-correction (including plug-ins like Captain’s Blowout Fixer) and other little tricks to compensate, but I would prefer to get decent exposure to begin with. I do notice this problem is worse when I use a Scene setting like “CINE D.” I did some tests the other day adjusting the color temp on that specific default scene setting, adjusting it more blue, and I noticed that helped the exposure problem. Is there a possibility there’s something off with my white balance?

Also, why don’t red objects blow out before grass and other green stuff?

Any further explanation or pointing me towards some resources would be greatly valued. It’s possible that there is just basic user error going on here. Thanks!

[Emilio Martinez]

Nattress has a “Film Effects” package and that has a Curves Effect in it; however, I don’t find it as intuitive or friendly as the Curves in Photoshop/After Effects. This is because you have to use sliders and you can only see the curves graphed on an overlay in the Canvas.

You can download a demo here.