Apple Color Float clipping

[Daniel Dávila]

Hy! Just to receive my Red One in Santiago, Chile and doing some research.

I´m testing the FCP / Color workflow as many here, and behind the issues already discussed, I have another doubt... is about floating point calculations clipping between rooms in Color, I assume there´s some relation with the graphic card installed.

It have been comented in other threads already, but I wanted to open it up, so, if anybody have good results doing a basic test, let´s say you blow up gain in primary room and get white clipping, and try to recover detail in a secondary grade, please post your configuration, right now I´m using a Macbook Pro with a ATY Radeon X1600 256MB card, but I´m going to buy a Mac Pro and I´m very interested in getting Color to use the Float mode like, for example, Shake, where you can convert your footage in float, apply a gain and later recover the values over 1.

This is my first posting and very exited to join the rebellion!

Greetings, Daniel

 

[Irri]

There is a setting for float in the setup room. I think if you blow something in the primary it is gone for good with Color. That's my experience anyway.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

If you loose it in the primary room, it's gone.... Drat.

Graeme

 

[Charles Angus]

Isn't that the point of float though?

 

[Graeme Nattress]

It should be.... That's why I'm confused. I'm sure it used to work. I know it effects how values are passed from shader to shader inside the ColorFX room.

Graeme

 

[Nick Shaw]

It appears that it is processing in float, but only in the 0-1 range. If you turn the master gain way down in the primary in room, and way up in the primary out room, you do not get the quantization you would expect with non float processing.

UPDATE
It's not even that simple. The primary in room appears to clip at 110IRE, but the Color FX room does not. If you use the exposure filter in Color FX and burn the image out, you can bring it back in by lowering the gain in the primary out room. Curiouser and curiouser…

 

[Graeme Nattress]

There are luts on the output of the primary room, hence the clipping there, but retaining float precision.

Graeme

 

[Nick Shaw]

There are luts on the output of the primary room, hence the clipping there, but retaining float precision.

Graeme

It might be useful then to have a check-box to "disable curves" and the resulting clipping.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

I guess that would be a feature request to Apple then!

Graeme

 

[Daniel Dávila]

thanks for the feedback, I guess this is another "maybe in the future it will work" feature in Color (besides native R3D support).
In the meantime, I think I can lower exposure a bit to retain highlight detail, export using redlog and monitor in Color using the 685 lut...

 

[Simon Blackledge]

thought so... been scratching my head for a while now.. Dammit!

Color (colour!) is neat in a dinky kind of way but I need something that just works.. grr.

s

 

[Trevor Meier]

In Project settings there's an option for setting the IRE ceiling... by default it's at 110. Try adjusting that to see if it gives you more headroom.

But, really, if you're in float it should just retain that info no matter what. Definitely worth filing a bug report/feature request.

 

[Cail Young]

You could try disabling Broadcast Safe.

 

[Daniel Dávila]

Thanks all for the feedback.

I think we all agree that we need the FCP-COLOR workflow to run smooth and clean, and we all need Color to work with R3D, or at least, as espected to a color grading app ( I personally feel that highlight clipping in float mode is a very important issue, specially if you are with DPX/CIN files and finishing for film output).
Yes, Scratch can work with R3D`s, and it´s a great app, but I´m talking about the big part of us that can´t afford Scratch, but will use the RED in a indie feature (here in Chile all film production can be called "indie") make a nice grading and give the DPX/CIN files somewhere to printout to film.
I think we are in time to make a list of bug/feature request as Red Users to give it to Apple, at least for Color, as I´ve seen many problems in this forum, but we all want to stay with FCS.

Thanks!

Daniel