• Wondering which camera, gear, computer, or software to buy? Ask in our Gear Guide.

Apple Color + Final Cut Pro

2001 Productions

2001 Productions

I'm color grading HD footage in Apple Color and it looks great. Then I render it out to my Final Cut timeline and there is a perceptible loss of quality, particularly where the image fades into shadows. Instead of a gradual fade, there is a series of progressively darker fields. Even if I output uncompressed from Color and set my timeline for uncompressed there is a loss of quality. I can toggle back and forth between Final Cut and Color on the same frame and clearly see the drop.

Anybody know what I'm doing wrong? :(
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
You really shouldn't be putting it back into FCP after final color grading anyway, running it through color (or any other final color correction tool) should be the final step in the chain before output.

This is the problem inherent with non linear editing software offering too many bells & whistles, it makes people think that they are supposed to use that program for virtually everything when really all it's intended for is to build the edited version of the film. Sound should be assembled somewhere better suited to the task, as should color correction, vfx, etc.

But, as for why this is happening, it very much sounds like a color clipping issue, so almost certainly FCP isn't operating with as much color information. Color probably uses 32bits per channel for color information.. Final Cut Pro is probably 8 or 16, hence the jaggies and banding.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Will Vincent said:
You really shouldn't be putting it back into FCP after final color grading anyway, running it through color (or any other final color correction tool) should be the final step in the chain before output.
Click to expand...

Wow, I had no idea. Forgive my ignorance, but how do you go anywhere else after Color? I mean, I render out from Color, right? But then I just have a bunch of corrected clips in files with no sound or anything. How does it work if Color is the final step?

(I hope my question makes sense! As you can probably tell I'm totally new to Color.)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
In PP and AE you can set the color depth of the working space(or chose to have that funky banding!) Im sure FCP would have something similar.

I do like your question 2001, Im thinking of a multi threaded work flow where folks edit, and color grade at the same time. Eventually we replace the clips in the NLE with the color corrected ones sometime during the edit process.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
wheatgrinder said:
In PP and AE you can set the color depth of the working space(or chose to have that funky banding!) Im sure FCP would have something similar.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure I have FCP set to highest quality. I think what Will is saying is that FCP is not capable of reproducing the quality that Color can.

wheatgrinder said:
Eventually we replace the clips in the NLE with the color corrected ones sometime during the edit process.
Click to expand...
That's what I've been doing. Not sure what I should be doing instead, but would love to know!
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
2001, no, I think your missing something.. I don't know those programs but this is exactly the type of thing you see when you render color information at lower bits...

In my quick searching... I found this line of text that hints at something similar..

Note: Because Final Cut Pro is a Y′CBCR processing application, and Color is an RGB processing application, Color Corrector 3-way conversions are only approximations and will not precisely match the original corrections made in Final Cut Pro.

I know that your not saying your colors are different, but the fact that the applications work with color space differently suggest that there might be other differences.. such as 8 bit vs 16bit vs 32 bit.. precision..

One suggestion I read is to render your Color affected clips as animation with the "trillions" of colors options (default of millions puts you into 8bit color mode) Then when you bring them back to FCP, they are in 16 bit color mode.. its worth a try..
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Forgive my ignorance, but how do you go anywhere else after Color? I mean, I render out from Color, right? But then I just have a bunch of corrected clips in files with no sound or anything. How does it work if Color is the final step?
Click to expand...

Yes I'd like to know what your exact workflow is as well Will, because soon I'll be struggling with these issues myself. Sorry as well if this seems like a basic question but I think that sort of info would benefit a bunch of us. You rarely find good advice about quality degradation in the manuals and tend to have to find it the hard way through trial and error.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
huh, Im trying this experiment now..

I created a little movie in AE with a color gradient that changes color over time. Nothing else.
I render that as animation "millions of colors" and another render with "millions of colors +" the "Millions of colors" rendered showed obvious color banding. The "millions of colors +" did not. I deleted the "millions of colors" video, so now we just have "the movie" with no color banding..

I imported the "the move" file into PP and the previews were color banded! I found the "maximum bit depth" setting in my video rendering settings, ticked that color banding gone from preview.

Now, I crated a new AE project, imported "the movie" with the intent to do some color tweaking, render as a new movie, and replace footage in PP. (in PP its Make off Line and then re LINK)

I did some BASIC color work. I just set the curves to a typical crush the blacks increase contrast.. and bam!, color banding!
Anything I did, form a tiny adjustment to the curves, to a Colorista lift gamma gain.. all produces color banding in the AE RAM PREVIEW... so thats my first block..

What does this prove.. "that I dont know what the heck Im doing..."
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
In some old posts 2001 I believe you used to run the CS3 workflow like Will..

PP EDIT -> Import PP project into AE -> AE CC -> AE Render final Movie

I don't know Color, is there any way to RENDER the final movie OUT of Color?

(sorry, realized I was hijacking this thread with my multitasking work flow comments..)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Will,
I did some experimenting today, trying to replace JUST THE ADUIO of a clip with audio that was tweaked in another program (cubase) I finally got it to work in PP.

So I have a video source file with audio. I want to manipulate the audio in cubase, but I dont want to wait for the edit to be done in PP (or say the edit IS done and you want to fix the audio for the entire asset as you use bits and pieces of it here and there in your timeline)

One option, is to use the Offline and Re-Link method. Set the asset to offline, make your tweaks to a copy of the original asset, update the audio and render the new asset. Not optimal as you have to create new video just to get audio. (the reverse is true if you wanted to bring in updated video from AE for example)

My goal is to update just the audio, or just the video of a PP clip, AFTER it has been edited on the time line, I don't want to manually line up a "tweaked" audio track with the existing VIDEO audio track.. Turns out to be rather simple.

In PP i have already imported the original video with audio asset. (a cineform avi)
I add it to a timeline, tweak the end points, do some edits etc.

Now I want to use cubase to modify the audio of that asset, so I do just that. Open the original cine form avi file as a track in a cubase project, tweak the audio, gates, noise suppression or what ever, and finally export a .wav file of the update audio.

Now back in PP, I import the new .wav file. Shift + Alt Click on the .wav file, and drag it over and drop it on the edited clip on the timeline.. thats it. The audio for the clip on the time line is now the audio I edited in cubase, its start \ end times are the same as the one on the time line, etc. I can extend, shorten the clip etc.

The gotchas.. I had PP is set up to import audio as mono tracks (edit - preferences - audio - Source Channel Mapping = mono) PP kept crashing when I tired the drag drop.. I think it might have worked if I had tried to drag and drop a mono file.. but I did not test that.

The rest of the mix I do in pp.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
I'm so confused.

My picture edit, fx, etc. are done. I export the edited sequence to Color. In Color, I grade the sequence. It looks good, so I add the shots to the render queue. The shots render out as individual .mov files, each in its own folder...

Now what??? There is no sound at all in Color, and the shots are output as individual files, not as a sequence. If I don't go back to Final Cut, how the heck do I restore the sequence?

Sorry if I'm missing something. I'm trying to keep up but I probably need my paradigm shifted.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Dude, I'm hurting for you!

So the clips look good in Color, can you view the rendered files OUTSIDE of FCP\COlor.. how do they look in QT viewer?


did you note this bit at the bottom of the page.. you might want to covert you HD to PRORES IN FCP (is that even possible, does that even make sense?) then do you Color workflow. Im still suspecting that its a color space issue.

----text from linked article above --
As a final side note, although I used HDV as an example, many users of Color highly recommend that you convert HDV video into a different format before bringing it into Color. Aside from the fact that other formats user a higher quality color space and are more pliable in post production, users have reported problems that seem to be related to the nature of the Long-GOP compression used in HDV and XDCAM. These same users are reporting problems with in or out points shifting, or keyframe animations not being executed on the correct frames. This is something to keep in mind if you plan on doing extensive grading on clips that originated from HDV or XDCAM sources.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I converted the video from HDV to Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) at the time that I first imported it from the camera. It has remained either in that format or no compression at all (for AE effects) during the entire process.

Color displays each frame full-screen as it renders out and the footage looks great. It isn't until I replace my timeline clips in FCP with the graded ones that the colors suddenly become blotchy and banded. What Will said makes sense: if Color is working with 32-bit and FCP is only capable of 8 or 16-bit, it certainly would explain the problem. What I'm unclear on is the solution.

I'm wondering if I output a QT movie of the sequence if that will go away. Maybe it's just the way FCP displays the video and the quality is actually present......HA! I should be so lucky.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
how bout this..

nternally, Final Cut Pro can do pixel calculations using 32-bit floating-point precision, which allows for very accurate calculations without rounding errors. This leads to much more accurate color reproduction when applying filters and compositing layers of video. This is especially important when you are going to show your movie on film or broadcast-quality video monitors. In Final Cut Pro, the Video Processing tab in the Sequence Settings window allows you to choose the rendering bit depth for a sequence. For more information, see Rendering and Video Processing Settings.


http://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/usermanual/index.html#chapter=C&section=11&tasks=true
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
FCP is using different color spec than color (obviously) but both are non destructive. They create metadate for the original footage. So while it may look worse in FCP, the footage still has the color's metadata, so, assuming your setting are all correct, when you export, the final product should look good as it did in color.
Editing software is really setting/hardware based. So I'd google some FCP to Color workflows before exporting to make sure everything is in sync. But hopefully it will, remeber FCP and Color are two different programs, so the footage will appear different; It's all in the metadata!
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top