FCP/Nuke/Color Problems

[Charles Angus]

Ok, so I have some footage, 10-bit Uncompressed QT. Rendered from Color. Imported into FCP. Touched up in Nuke. Brought back into FCP.

When opened in FCP, the colour in the clip rendered from Nuke is very, very slightly off. It's just slightly more magenta when compared to the clip that went in to Nuke.

The kicker is this - if I open the before and after clips in Color - the colour is exactly the same!

So, the clip before Nuke doesn't match the clip after Nuke in FCP, but it does match in Color. This is a new one to me... I thought I'd seen it all with QT issues, but I guess I was wrong. This holds true in the output from my Intensity card, too.

I'm tearing my hair out, here. Any ideas?

 

[Charles Angus]

Oh, and I've tried a variety of colorspace settings in Nuke, which has had no effect.

 

[Nick Shaw]

It's a difference in decoding the QuickTime as Y'CbCr (as FCP does) and as (R'G'B') as Color and Nuke do. Isn't QuickTime fun! I have reported this issue to The Foundry before, but I suggest you do so too, and show them your example.

 

[Charles Angus]

I'll do that.

I'd forgotten about the old luma/chroma vs. RGB issue in Quicktime - it's been a while since that one bit me bad.

I think that this just did it - I think I just decided never to use FCP or QT for anything, ever again...

 

[paulherrin]

lol. you did check the colorspace in both the read node and your project settings, correct?

 

[Charles Angus]

lol. you did check the colorspace in both the read node and your project settings, correct?

Yup...

This is very, very subtle, but it's a pretty subtly lit shot, and you've just seen that shot two shots earlier in the edit without any effects, so the tiny colour shift is definitely noticeable.

Besides the colour shift, it also somehow just looks less "nice" - somehow muddier, skin tones less pleasing, etc.

Sigh. My stopgap has been to re-send the sequence to Color, and re-grade that shot to look wrong in Color, and right in FCP. Which is stupid, and hopefully pandering to the right bad-looking footage.

Oh, I should have mentioned - the shot from Nuke actually looks *perfect* in Color - no colour shift whatsoever. Not even a little bit. I wish it looked like that in FCP...

 

[Nick Shaw]

Oh, I should have mentioned - the shot from Nuke actually looks *perfect* in Color - no colour shift whatsoever. Not even a little bit. I wish it looked like that in FCP...

So what happens if you then render it out of Color without actually doing anything?

 

[paulherrin]

so then fcp is your where you have your problem.

 

[Charles Angus]

So what happens if you then render it out of Color without actually doing anything?

Same - looks wrong in FCP and right in Color.

That said, The Foundry got back to me on this, and this is fixed in 6.2v1.

Yay!

 

[Nick Shaw]

That said, The Foundry got back to me on this, and this is fixed in 6.2v1.

Yay!

Great news! I've downloaded 6.2, but not had time to check it out yet.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Just want to add that we've noticed a color difference going from Color back to FCP with our R3D footage. We're about to start using Nuke, so I'm glad to see that it's been fixed on that end.

Is there anything we can go to address the R'G'B' to Y'CbCr rendering differential between Color and FCP? We've got spots going out to broadcast and can't tell if we should trust our monitors, our eyes, our measurements, or one of the programs over the other.