Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Footage in REDCINE-X & CS6 different from on set - What am I doing wrong?

Michael Patterson

Michael Patterson

Well-known member
Joined
Oct 23, 2011
Messages
326
Reaction score
0
Points
16
Location
New Berlin, WI
So this has been happening more and more as of late. I'm out in the field or studio and I have the shot dialed in to how I like it and the client is happy. I'm looking on the 5 inch touch ( which I find a touch cool) and running HD-SDI to a calibrated production monitor. It looks great and everyone is happy. Then I get home and check everything out and on the same production monitor and computer monitor everything is darker and way way warmer. I have to dial it down at least 300k to get even close to where I was on set. The metadata is the same and nothing is shifting. Am I doing something wrong? Has anyone else noticed this?
 
Well, even if you're on the same monitor, you're looking at it under different lightbulbs. The light around you on set is different than the light in your studio/office/car/home/wherever, and your eyes adjust. Since your eyes white-balance to the light around you, looking at the monitor will look different, since your eyes are now calibrated to a different white-point.
 
Sorry, but it's way to drastic of a difference to be that. I see what you're saying and I've encountered that before but this can't be explained by an ambient white point difference.
 
Trust me it's not it. Just to be sure I ran the hdsdi to the monitor hdsdi 1 input from the scarlet with a clip loaded and loaded the same clip in cs6 and ran that to hdsdi 2 and switched back and forth. Huge difference. 300k was a low end estimate. Depending on the clip it can be more. Also it's darker. At least a stop difference. Maybe more.
 
I have noticed this as well. After further investigation it was my eyes. Without question. Shoot with a color checker to balance your colors in post if you are having issues. 300K is nothing in the sense that our eyes adjust to the light around us to compensate for differences within thousands of degrees kelvin.

To look on the bright side though, we are shooting raw and can adjust anything we would like in post without destroying our footage! As long as you expose your footage properly and keep it between the goalposts you will be AOK. Thats pretty cool.
 
Tint values are the same. All metadata matches. It's really weird.
 
There are a few things on computers that can mess up things. Video-renderers for example, on a windows pc just play around with the different output-renderers in mpc-hc to get a glue whats going on with that. Another thing are gpu-drivers... or just different software. You did the display calibration with that calibration software, that doesn't necessarily mean that all software output is perfect. ;)

How is that HD-SDI production monitor connected to your computer?
 
I'm on a mac pro tower with a cuda card and I'm running the hd-sdi feed through a blackmagic sdi card.
 
Hmmm, Mac, i'm out here... Hehe, don't have much experience with OSX. But you should try this: route some calibration screens through exactly the same soft/hardware that you use for your R3Ds, maybe convert some charts to R3D... It's possible that you see differences, your monitor might need a second calibration then.
 
Do you think it may be possible that I would need a different calibration for each? One for the sdi out of the Scarlet and one for the sdi out of the Blackmagic card?
 
I just noticed this too. Shot an interview, looked great. Brought it into CS6, darker. About a stop darker.
 
We just noticed in Final Cut 7 this week that, depending on the settings of the timeline, you get a different image output. The codec of the timeline affects what you see out.

We put Color Bars on the timeline. The timeline was set to Uncompressed 8-Bit. Exported a PNG. Brought the PNG back in. Looking at the PNG from the footage bin looked darker. Bringing it onto the original timeline lightened it up, but it was still off from the original Final Cut-generated Color Bars. Long story short, the colors you see depend on the codec that is decoding the information, and the codec you use depends on where/how you're viewing it.

Now, of course you're in Premiere and not Final Cut. But maybe the way the timeline is set up is affecting the color output?
 
#1 - The SDI out on the camera is a low quality video tap. So you should expect a little difference
#2 - your SDI monitor needs to calibrated for whatever is sending it a signal. i.e. the exact same color bars will look different on the monitor if sent from FCP, CS6, Resolve, Color, or camera.

I just did a quick test, only looking at brightness, on one of my systems.

+0 brightness - camera
-7 brightness - Resolve Lite 9
-11 brightness - FCP 7
-19 brightness - Apple Color

What is your SDI monitor calibrated for?



Dusty
 
I've done blue only with CS6 and the Scarlet and both look good with everything dead center on phase chroma bright and contrast. For what it's worth the monitor is a 24inch JVC.
 
Dusty - Yup. It's right on. The brightness difference isn't as big of a deal, because some of that can be explained away by viewing environment, but it's still bothersome. It's the overall shift in WB that is really frustrating.
 
Ok, so on a whim, even though I wasn't having any functionality issues, I re-flashed the firmware and all is perfect. I have no idea why, but now the monitor path and the production monitor in CS6 are exactly the same. Super weird. It seemed to have gotten progressively worse over the past month or so, so I guess it just needed a refresh. Sorry if this wasted anyone's time, but maybe it will help someone else down the line.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top