[Paul Willis]

Solved… sort of…

If I just set the preset to ‘none’ and set up an MXF render with identical settings myself, it works. It doesn’t work using the round trip preset, despite settings being identical. This is only an issue on this one project so it’s very strange, but it seems to be a bug and it happened on several machines but only on this one project. Not updated or changed anything else.

Anyway, there’s the work around if anyone needs it!

[Paul Willis]

Thanks, Joseph. It seems to be a tricky issue and in a lot of ways that puts my mind at rest that the source file is troublesome, although it comes out fine monitoring in 709.

I have recently been asked to supply a file for review on a laptop (terrible idea, but it gives them a vague idea about where the grade is going), is it just best to stick with 709 and ignore any comments about contrast?! I was hoping I could find a middle ground with some tweaks, but I’m unsure what to do with that. If I run it into premiere is clearly remaps to full range (according to the internal scopes) for viewing, but what’s going to come out is probably video scaled again. I haven’t had chance to run enough tests to be honest, I’m forcing the client to come into the suite!

I’d love to know what BBC iPlayer and other online services do. Perhaps a question for their tech team.

[Paul Willis]

I do as Marc says, it’s generally very inconsistent from Premiere, sometimes it works and sometimes it just seems to make no sense at all. It’s a case of finding the speed changes in Premiere, marking them and exporting them individually or queuing them. It’s time consuming but much less so than dealing with a dodgy conform.

Paul

[Paul Willis]

I’ve been running it in demo mode and it works ‘for a few minutes’ in export before disabling.

They’re not a very transparent company, I had to email the sales director personally to find out any information at all. It’s £495 to buy, which is a bit steep but if it works then it’s great as it’s extremely customisable and could save a lot of stress. You can also hire the plugin but they haven’t got back to me on the pricing yet. I’m not sure why they have the pricing shrouded in such secrecy!

I wish I had a better idea how effective it was but there’s very little information out there about it. It seems to claim that it will definitely work as long as you transcode to a high bitrate codec, which of course you would be doing anyway.

[Paul Willis]

Thanks, Joseph.

That helps me get my head around the issues with software legalisers, I can see that there’s never going to be a truly reliable solution with software. The EyeHeight plugin looks the most legitimate I’ve seen out there, it’s made by a company that makes hardware legalisers and seems to justify its effectiveness with good documentation and does seem to work be being deliberately over conservative. However, I can see from your explanation that it can’t ever be 100% safe.

This is always going to be a headache for people learning the craft, especially if they haven’t begun their career working in a post facility that has access to the right hardware and experienced colourists to show them the ropes. I’m very thankful that the community is willing to offer advice on this stuff for those trying to learn at home.

It seems I may be lucky this time in that they want the grade delivered back to edit for online and titles, which means they’re going to have to run it through a legaliser their end anyway. I’ll work within the limits as best I can and apply a limit of -10-110 in Resolve for the time being. Time to build up my hardware arsenal when I receive the pay check!

Paul

[Paul Willis]

Ahh, It seems that it is me that’s being too conservative! I have been dubious of software legalisers so I went too conservative to be on the safe side. If it really is a hard limiter that shouldn’t let anything through, then I’ll ease off on it.

Thanks again, I’m still learning and still practicing and it’s gradually falling into place.

Paul

[Paul Willis]

Thanks, Juan.

I understand the settings for the legaliser range, I’ve set it to 0-100 to be as safe as I can be. I’m just wondering why I get what I assume to be excess colour saturation in the shadows on so much of the footage, I guess I can’t properly see where the problem areas are without a hardware vectorscope and I’m just ending up desaturating large areas of deep reds and lifting them out of the shadows.

The main thing confusing me was the wildly different ways in which the Resolve limiter affects the footage compared to the EyeHeight limiter. There’s very little information on this product at the moment so I am not sure how reliable it is, but I guess with all software limiters there’s no guarantee. With regards to the video scaled signal, I was simply referring to making sure that I was testing the clip was being interpreted the same way within Premiere and Resolve for testing purposes. I know exporting video scaled isn’t going to ensure legality.