FCP color gamma shit

[redman2021]

Whats the deal with the shift in color or/and gamma or exposer in playback during final cut. Im using the latest in vs 6. and a mac book pro with 4 gigs of ram. Is there a setting in quicktime or FCP in need to click?
It's so inconsistent when it decides to shift.
I'm using the medium proxies for a feature edit. I know the R3D files are fine but it sucks to have a visual offline so inconsistent even for reference.

Is there anything i can do?

thanks

 

[Ed Watkins]

Does the gamma physically shift during play back? i.e does the image start looking fine and then suddenly shift? Or does the image just play back brighter and less saturated than you expected?

The camera generated proxies are (at the moment) ungraded, hence you will be seeing the proxy of the RAW file which when viewed directly is desaturated, lighter and grayish. You can generate color corrected proxies using REDLINE / REDALERT, but REDALERT will not pass through the sound.

 

[redman2021]

Does the gamma physically shift during play back? i.e does the image start looking fine and then suddenly shift? Or does the image just play back brighter and less saturated than you expected?

The camera generated proxies are (at the moment) ungraded, hence you will be seeing the proxy of the RAW file which when viewed directly is desaturated, lighter and grayish. You can generate color corrected proxies using REDLINE / REDALERT, but REDALERT will not pass through the sound.

We are using the 1K proxies from what it generates as an offline view. The shift happens once I press the space bar. I know people have seen this issue. Is there a way to see the proxies in FCP in a time line without this shif and see the RAW file view?

 

[Shane Betts]

The shift happens once I press the space bar

Do you have overlays turned on in FCP? Picture safe, zebras etc? Not sure about v6 but I know in v5 and earlier the colour space is different in pause than in play mode when overlays are on.

Hope that's a help.

 

[JohnLands]

FCP does not read gama correct its a fact of life, Long story short there is no way. Unless you grade first. Trust me when i say there is no way. I just went through this on a 25 million dollar feature and we are correcting the entire movie first so we have something that resembles what we shot. Sucks but tis another problem with red and apple that should be fixed in the future by apple. Nothing red can really do. its a software thing.

 

[Patrick Tresch]

FCP does not read gama correct its a fact of life, Long story short there is no way.

Aren't we mixing up two different things?

- A FCP gamma problem (inherent to FCP)
- R3D QT proxies that when used on slower Mac's just aren't able to interprete the metadata correctly due to the overload of the CPU. Hence the gamma/color correction of the metadata are skipped when playing.



Pat

 

[JohnLands]

Nope FCP cant read gama right and will always be off. Just a fact of life.

 

[laguun]

3 limitations in FCP are really problematic for RED workflows:

- Gamma disorder
- No 4K resolution
- Only 8bit RGB

Adobe CS3 Premiere has none of them - 4K, full RGB color and gammacorrection.

I really wonder why Apple doesnt fix this - since years thousands of users complain about these technical problems. Instead of fixing it, users navigate around these footage-quality reducing holes in FCS (by abusing YUV float as RGB, colorconversion every time, a do-not for any networked workflow, by hacking FCP XML to 4000pixels instead for 4K and prerendering everything to offset the gamma errors in FCP).

I have to admit that i am getting more and more disappointed by apple lack of comment, commitment and solutions for these problems. They *do* know about these issues since years now. FCS has an excellent price/performance ratio, but the quality degradations are a hefty penalty for us.

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

I really wonder why Apple doesnt fix this - since years thousands of users complain about these technical problems. Instead of fixing it, users navigate around these footage-quality reducing holes in FCS (by abusing YUV float as RGB, colorconversion every time, a do-not for any networked workflow, by hacking FCP XML to 4000pixels instead for 4K and prerendering everything to offset the gamma errors in FCP).

I have to admit that i am getting more and more disappointed by apple lack of comment, commitment and solutions for these problems. They *do* know about these issues since years now. FCS has an excellent price/performance ratio, but the quality degradations are a hefty penalty for us.

I guess it's because they don't really give a sh*t.

The performance of FCS2 on a new Mac Pro is horrible. RAM and CPU core utilization totally sucks and still a lot of bugs are here.