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Help! ProRes 4444 looks TERRIBLE in FCP

James Page

James Page

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I've graded my footage in RED Cine X (build 221) and rendered it to ProRes4444.

When its played through Quicktime it looks great. But when played in or exported from FCP, it looks horrendous. it looks pixellated (as if i'd rendered it to a low quality H264 file), so i thought maybe its the gamma?

Can someone help? I'm guessing its something very simple, but i can't work it out.
 
Can't help you with it, but i posted yesterday how nice my footage looked while grading on redcine-x build 221 and output via redrocket card via HD-SDI out and then into AJA converter to go out via HDMI and into HP Dreamcolor--So monitoring was nice on the HP Monitor set to REC.709 and all looked absolutely beautiful while grading.

Then, converted to Prores 4444 and the result looks TERRIBLE and footage looks washed out and saturation is poor.

So....there seems to be something strange when playing back prores 4444 footage after a grade on redcine-x. Now i also should mention that playback was on my Dell monitor, but the results are incredibly different.

Some things i'm told to be aware of are to load latest QT beta plugin---i did.
I recall others mentioning a similar problem, so hopefully we can get an answer as to why the footage looks so different.
 
Try a small test.

IN your RCX export setting, if you select PRORES 4444 then DO NOT have the gamma set to AUTOMATIC. Set it to none and it shooul be better across all platforms.

Also.

It is much more helpful to have you system details posted in order for people to help you directly. Here is what I do not know:

System details
Software version
QT version
FCP version
Any pertinant RED software versions you have installed.

Render output settings from RC-X

You also understand that with out a proper monitoring card or digital cinema desktop you can not judge footage in FCP. The browser and Viewer windows only display ONE FIELD of information.

David
 
BajaProductions said:
David,
under the compression settings for redcine-x export the only Gamma Correction choices are Automatic or None. Are you suggesting to leave it at none?
Click to expand...

Yes. If that does not fix it then it might be something in the new QT codec.

David
 
Hi

Yeh i understand that it won't look perfect from FCP, but it looks significantly worse than the 1/4res ProRes 422 files i was using to offline. In fact its unusably worse.

Export settings were:
ProRes4444, 2048x1024, Full debayer, Depth:millions of colours+ Gamma correction: none

System Details: Macbook Pro OS X 10.5.8
Software Versions: RCX 221, FCP 7, QT 7.6.6

David Battistella said:
Try a small test.

It is much more helpful to have you system details posted in order for people to help you directly. Here is what I do not know:

System details
Software version
QT version
FCP version
Any pertinant RED software versions you have installed.

Render output settings from RC-X

You also understand that with out a proper monitoring card or digital cinema desktop you can not judge footage in FCP. The browser and Viewer windows only display ONE FIELD of information.

David
Click to expand...
 
Do you have a sample clip you can post? If it was strictly a gamma difference, then we could try and figure out where the shift might be happening, but if it's a pixilation problem where the quality seems to be deteriorating quite a bit, that seems like some other problem and I'd be curious to see what that looks like.
 
Well, i tried by unchecking automatic and checking NONE for gamma. But same washed out color when I get QT.mov I did in fact load the latest QT Beta plugin when build 221 was announced. I'm also color correcting from my macpro with redrocket card attached and output via HD-SDI to HP Dreamcolor through AJA hi5-3G that converts hd-sdi to HDMI into the Dreamcolor that is set to REC.709.

Colors are very rich looking on the dreamcolor that has a gamma of 2.4 set on it---factory set for rec709 but when I transcode to proress 4444 it looks very unsaturated and washed out.

Trying to think of what other factors can create this other than something with Gamma, but nothing comes to mind.
 
I have always fought with gamma changes between Red software and FCP.

I have taken to adding a 3-way color corrector and pulling it back to how it looked in RCX.

Wish I had a real solution, but this has served me well the last 18 months.
 
Its not so much the colour that the problem, its the banding and overall crappy quality to the image. It looks like a 1/8 proxy.

jimhare said:
I have always fought with gamma changes between Red software and FCP.

I have taken to adding a 3-way color corrector and pulling it back to how it looked in RCX.

Wish I had a real solution, but this has served me well the last 18 months.
Click to expand...
 
What I found is that the gamma shift brings up the noise floor and all of the artifacts that come with it. When I make a DVD without the 3-way, it looks as you describe, like milky noise garbage.

With the 3-way I pull down the blacks and sometimes push up the mids a bit.

This makes it come back to life and look like it did in Red Cine.

The banding may be an 8-bit issue. Have you looked into this?

Like you, I would like to know a solution and to have the noise and artifacts not be there in the first place. But this technique has worked well for me on some major releases.
 
I took a look at it in FCP 7, and it looks just like it does in QT.

1) Are you loading the QT from the browser into the viewer? Or are you dropping it into a sequence first? In a sequence it will be rendering to match the sequence settings if they are different from the file settings (2048x1024 ProRes 4x4, etc.)

2) Are you viewing on an HD display? In that case it there is scaling going on too from 2:1 to 16:9.
 
Justin Barham said:
I took a look at it in FCP 7, and it looks just like it does in QT.

1) Are you loading the QT from the browser into the viewer? Or are you dropping it into a sequence first? In a sequence it will be rendering to match the sequence settings if they are different from the file settings (2048x1024 ProRes 4x4, etc.)

2) Are you viewing on an HD display? In that case it there is scaling going on too from 2:1 to 16:9.
Click to expand...

1) both. in the viewer, and into a new sequence (changing the sequence settings to match)

2) i'm looking at it on a 1.5 year old glossy macbook pro screen.
 
What are the ISO and FLUT settings? can you post a snapshot of the histogram?
Was this shot lit?

Try a test with prores 422 as well.

David
 
BajaProductions said:
Well, i tried by unchecking automatic and checking NONE for gamma. But same washed out color when I get QT.mov I did in fact load the latest QT Beta plugin when build 221 was announced. I'm also color correcting from my macpro with redrocket card attached and output via HD-SDI to HP Dreamcolor through AJA hi5-3G that converts hd-sdi to HDMI into the Dreamcolor that is set to REC.709.

Colors are very rich looking on the dreamcolor that has a gamma of 2.4 set on it---factory set for rec709 but when I transcode to proress 4444 it looks very unsaturated and washed out.

Trying to think of what other factors can create this other than something with Gamma, but nothing comes to mind.
Click to expand...

There has to be somethign going on where the grade does not apply to the clip. I have found that PRORES is the most accurate compared to the R3D window. Are you using REDCOLOR and REDGAMMA as the settings?

david
 
Hi David,
yes, using redcolor/redgamma. I had also loaded the latest QT beta component and that made a very slight change in the look of the QT's, but still very washed out. I even turned off rocket monitoring and then connected the Dreamcolor via DVI to my Mac and still looks washed out....the thinking was maybe it was my CC monitor showing me a nice look, but it shows it also when i open it from my Mac. My gamma settings are at 2.2 on Mac.

So my next step is to reload the old QT component and go back to redcine-x build 104 and check with those transcodes. Can't think of any other changes to make./?
 
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