[Matt Lyon]

Hey Adam,

Just to throw my $0.02 in the mix: Your situation is indeed a good opportunity to upgrade your setup and gain some new skills. But before you go and spend a bunch of money, have you considered taking your film to a good post facility and getting a grade done by an experienced colorist? You’ll probably get a better final product. Also, by watching the colorist work, you may indeed learn more then you would on your own trying to do it yourself. I don’t know what your budget is, but I think you and the producer owe it to yourselves to at least get a few quotes.

A good post facility should also be able to guarantee that their output will pass network QC.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Success! I put the drives back in the enclosure and we tried out a new power supply in the shop. The drives powered back on instantly and sound pretty healthy. Thanks for everyone’s help.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

@ Chris:

Thanks. Please definitely post about it next time you get a chance to play with the program. If I figure anything out, I’ll update the thread.

@ Bill:

Have you searched on the forum about this issue? There should be tons of posts. Some people report success with other packages, like Episode, or Matrox HD Compress. I’ve had some luck with the quicktime x264 plugin (and messing with the gamma and NCLC atom).

As far as WYSIWYG output goes, I think a lot depends on whether you consider the FCP viewer to be “correct.” It really isn’t. There’s a reason everyone on the forum advocates using a broadcast monitor: Remember in 8 bit digital video, black corresponds to the RGB values of 16,16,16 and white is 235,235,235. But on a computer display, black is 0,0,0 and white is 255,255,255.

So if you grade your video based on your FCP canvas, and push those blacks so they’re nice and dark at 0,0,0 and stretch your whites to 255,255,255, your video is now totally off spec for broadcast and will probably look pretty bad on a TV. But it might look just perfect for web based playback (and maybe that’s all you need).

I guess at the end of the day whatever makes the client happy is all that matters (so long as it passes network QC – if you’re making TV). The only thing I know for certain is that thinking about this too much makes my head hurt 🙂

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

[Chris Gordon] ” I’ve used JES Deinterlacer (https://www.xs4all.nl/~jeschot/home.html) in the past to adjust the gamma value of an h.264 file after render from FC. Pretty much leave all of the other settings alone and just adjust the gamma value.”

Thanks for the tip Chris, this looks like a handy program. Do you know if it’s possible to change the gamma without having to re-encode the whole movie? I only messed around for a few minutes, but this didn’t seem possible.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hey all,

This topic has been bugging me since the thread started, so I’ve been doing more testing!

I’m now almost positive that for the most accurate colors in the FCP viewers (at least as far as that is possible), it is optimal to set your display profiles to 1.8 gamma. FCP will darken the images into a pseudo 2.2 gamma space. If your monitors are set to 2.2, then the images in FCP will appear too dark.

This is all in FCP 6.0.6 + Snow Leopard (and regular Leopard, for that matter) … I’m not sure if FCP 7 changes things.

Of course, the problem still remains that most of the world works in 2.2 gamma land. So I guess the solution is to toggle between 1.8 and 2.2 display profiles all the time? One for editing and one for QC’ing?

Of course, the usual disclaimers apply: test for yourself, etc

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hey all,

A poster on another thread linked to this article about FCP’s assumptions about system gamma:

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT2912

I can confirm that this is definitely true of FCP v1-6, but I haven’t used FCP 7 enough to confirm or deny (this article predates FCP 7).

So the point is, if your monitor(s) are calibrated to 2.2, then images will be displayed in the FCP windows with too high a gamma (too saturated and contrasty).

But once you export an H264 quicktime, I would still think it seems best to view under 2.2 gamma settings, to more closely approximate what PC users see.

A bit of a PITA, eh? I’m hoping to do some more exhaustive tests soon!

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Gyuri,

These tests are only really meaningful if you send your output back to the editor and he/she A/B’s them with the originals in FCP on a broadcast monitor, through proper hardware.

Comparing stuff in Quicktime can sometimes be helpful, but can also be misleading unfortunately.

We had similar issues with ProRes VFX work at the shop I’m currently at. However, I think it was a YUV>RGB>YUV color shift issue, as opposed to a gamma problem (the Nuke artist was rending to the Animation Codec originally). We switched the VFX renders to 10 Bit Uncompressed and the problem went away. You might want to give that a shot.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

It’s also vital that you have the correct default sequence settings selected in the “audio/video settings” dialog box when you import your files. This sequence setting must match the timebase of your incoming files.

I wrote a tutorial about the proper way to import audio:

https://library.creativecow.net/lyon_matt/fixing-fcp-assets/1

(you can skip to the second half)

Everything Bouke says is spot on. FCP is kinda nuts! But if you know how it thinks, you can get predictable results.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Thanks Fred, I haven’t heard that tip before. You vary the voltage a little bit, but within 2%? I guess this gives the drive a little kick start that spurs it into action?

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems that the power supply is to blame. The RAID died a very slow death. First it would take 30 minutes to power up, then a day, then a couple days … then flatline.

Luckily I got the important stuff off when I noticed the trouble. But It may be a while before I get around to picking up a new power supply, but I’ll let you guys know how it works out!

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

I too have battled this every day. I don’t think you are doing anything “wrong,” this is just the way FCP behaves.

A couple work arounds:

roll the edit forward a few frames, add a transition, switch the transition to “start on edit,” then roll the edit back to where you really want it to start.

-or-

option-drag a transition from somewhere else in the timeline to your edit point. If you carefully line up your cursor, you can drop it on the edit and have it become a “start on edit” transition. (This might even work w/ dragging and dropping from the “effects” bin — I haven’t tested though).

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto