[John Collucci]

Hi Adam,

I am in total agreement with you that the image should not look drastically different, however, Final Cut has to manage different types of color values and it’s possible there is a conversion happening.

Could you do me a fave, and troubleshoot this a little bit with us?

1) In finder, control-click your original file and select “open with” and choose Final Cut Pro.
Compare this opened file to the one already imported into the project or on the timeline.

2) Check your sequence settings. Is the codec the same as the source material? Encoders have different ways of handling luma levels, especially when dealing with YUV vs. RGB and so on.

Please report back with info.

[John Collucci]

Hi Adam,

Since my original post, a few things have happened.
1) The project died at the hand of client focus groups. The media buy was aborted.
2) We have upgraded to Final Cut Studio 3. This changed some workflow options & quirks.
3) I have had more success with the newest version of compressor.
4) It may just be me, but FCP 7’s scaling seems even better than FCP 6.

To detail what worked on my project before it died, my best looking software conversion was done exactly as you describe in FCP. I dropped my HD timeline into an SD sequence (center-cut to master in 4×3 however) and then I rendered with the appropriate 10-bit broadcast settings. This looked great to my eye, however, my original footage was not extremely beautiful OR color-corrected due to the director’s method of shooting with “homemade authenticity”. It’s possible that I would have noticed some scaling or interlace artifacts if I had been working with higher production-value footage.

I’ve worked on other HD projects since, and finished in 24p before adding pulldown and laying off the finals to a 29.97i timeline. In these recent instances, I’ve had no issues with the software conversion in FCP – however I am still waiting on my new HD hardware to arrive and put it through a comparison test. I have no doubt it will be better – but I’m not crying out for it.

[John Collucci]

Thanks for the advice John.

I’ve tried compressor to go to SD Uncompressed 10-bit NTSC with a center cut, but I can’t seem to disable the de-interlacing. Honestly, the new downconverted footage from compressor looks much worse than the simple downscale and render that I did in FCP as a working edit.

When I say “looks worse” I’m referring to what looks mostly like aliasing. Combined with the de-interlacing, it’s unusable.

For now I am working completely within FCP since it seems to be yielding better results conversion wise. If anyone has any experience that they’d like to share on how to get a good SD downconversion in compressor, I’d love to try it, and it would be greatly appreciated.

~j!

[John Collucci]

Thanks for the tip. I’ve done a few searches already but with nothing completely relevant showing up.

My Kona card is SD only, we’re in the process of an HD upgrade, but in the meantime I suppose that a software conversion will have to do.

Anyone else have any ideas? Is there any reason why I shoul use compressor over Quicktime Pro? I imagine that de-interlacing is best as well, but I’d really like some input from some more people who know before I decide on a workflow.

Thanks for the reply John!

[John Collucci]

I am having this same issue!

I “fixed it” by manually replacing the clips on the timeline that were causing the problems. I actually used the timecode of the clip on the timeline, to manually re-create the clips from their source material, and then overwrite the clips on the timeline. In theory they were identical, but in practice, something was wrong before I did this.

One of them timeline clips was time-remapped. Not sure if that’s related to the issue. ONE TRACK of the associated audio clip was also displaying the name of a DIFFERENT file, but continued to play the correct audio when played back.

These are scary errors. But all seems fine for now.

If I run into this again, I will be making a service call.