[Joe Maller]

Based on FCP’s internal waveform monitor, both my Broadcast Legalizer and Apple’s Broadcast safe filter appear not to be accurate in FCP 5. The underlying controls do still work, just double-check their output against the scopes. A revised version of Broadcast Legalizer will be included in this month’s beta release.

There are some example images and screenshots on the Broadcast Legalizer page.

If your video is starting with a Luma floor of 7.5, possibly resulting from the BetaSP source, the default settings would cause the image to look “milky” because the floor would be further elevated above 7.5 IRE. (Depending on who you talk to, the 7.5 IRE floor may be a relic of analog and not necessary anymore.) Set the output Luma Floor to 0 (zero) and see if the results look better.

Because a frame-by-frame evaluation would be terribly slow and result in unpredictable shifts over time, my filter (and Apple’s) work from baseline assumptions about theoretical maximum video levels. Apple’s filter’s strategy is to clamp or roll off out-of-range values. That leaves middle image values untouched but I think it unnaturally over-compresses the highs and lows. My method compresses the overall frame to fit within the accepted broadcast-safe range of 7.5-100 IRE.

Joe Maller
http://www.joesfilters.com
http://www.fxscriptreference.org
Joe’s Filters and The FXScript Reference
for Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express