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  • 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 :)

Need help, FCP X can't handle REDGamma, absurd blue luma noise....

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Nathaniel Opgenorth

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Ok so first off I'd like to provide a link to someone with the same issue but the answers were less conclusive... http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/20269
NOW I plan on eventually shooting on RED Scarlet or RED Epic MX and thus I want to make sure I have this workflow down very well...for what its worth I have enjoyed RCX and the entire RED workflow with the later versions of FCP X...really its great and it beats the ARRIRAW workflow by a ton as well as some other workflows I've had the misfortune to deal with (lol). So to understand this workflow better I grabbed a bunch of .r3d's that I downloaded from threads on here where people offer samples, which if anyone does this or sees a shot they offered I just want to say thank you and the use of the shots is soley for my internal testing. Anyways I was editing in a 4K 2:1 AR timeline in FCP X and everything was going fine putting the clips in. I exported to ProRes 4444 and I got the blue noise issue...now I figured it might be some issue with FCP X mapping the color wrong to the codec and I tried exporting in H264 and ProRes 422 and got the same issue...So I found the same thing on Creative COW, found that REDGamma3 was not working with said user so I switched to REDGamma! Bingo! Most of the shots lost their nasty weird blue noise except for some of the noiser ones...additionally REDGamma2 exhibits the same issues. Now a work around could be just transcoding everything in RCX to ProRes 4444 as then everything is fine (this is what I had to do for some 6K Dragon .r3d's anyways) but I like having the RAW files for obvious reasons! Now I'm nervous because if this were my actual footage and I had to deliver to a client this would be unacceptable! See the screenshots below (uploading now if they don't appear). Does anyone have any experience with this issue? I have a early 2013 retina MacBook Pro 2.4GHz i7 Quad-Core 8GB RAM, and use the Nvidia GT 650M....

Some of the noise is hard to see in some shots, its very apparent on my retina screen though and unfortunately uploading the full 4K screenshots isn't easy.
EDIT: There is a download button if you click the image and go to Photobucket, you should be able to get the 4K screenshot in full...if not Ill try and repost.






PS: I know it might be a sin in some peoples eyes to even use the word FCP X but I simply love it! I have Premiere Pro and am learning the ropes on that but FCP X is so fast.

Anyways thank you for any advice! Worse comes to worse I guess I'll be using RCX and transcoding everything to ProRes 4444 prior to editing but like I said I really like the RAW workflow for stuff I can take my time with!
 
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That blue noise issue is a pain in the ass - basically a deal breaker. I've never gotten it working - not even at all but I must say, very little persistence with the FCPX route.
 
There are simple solutions:
Either you add some lights (if you want the tonality in the bottom,
or you make them black, if you want them black

Images like these... For some it helps to expose them at 320 ISO.
An R3D snap would help, as I suspect there is a third common issue at play here. which is mostly post related.
 
Have you tried the same shots and project on another computer with a video card or an iMac, or a nMP.

if this is happening on one model, with a specific graphics card, then that is a different story. I have never seen this on. 17" MacBook, a Mac Pro or an iMac, so it might be isolated to how the graphics card on the specific machine is handling the debayer.

This is would have to be resolved in the REDcode plugin.

Battistella
 
I've seen a couple of these shots on my machine and it does not display this way in fcp x.

What OS are you running?
What version of fcp x?
How much ram?
which version of the REDcode plugin? Latest? Reinstalled?
Which MacBook retina?
what are the compression settings in the metadata of the r3d's
how was the metadata set prior to import into fcpx? That has an effect for sure and if you tweak in RCX you have to reimport if you want to see the changes)
who dp'd these shots? Do you know about their lighting levels and ratios?

sorry, these are just a few of the questions that come up when I see extremely inflammatory thread titles. :)

battistella
 
Why are you using REDgamma and REDgamma2 in the first place?
Have you tried checking it with REDlog and REDgamma3?
 
And please do post a R3D snap so we can check it out. Not seeing what you are seeing with my footage.
 
Its a FCPX / OSX / Video Card Driver glitch for sure. I've seen it on two different (Haswell and prior) rMBP's, an iMac and two MacPros with QUADRO 4000 / GTX 680's. It seems to not appear on others at random. All these machines had a mix of GPU, OSX versions and drivers. Very strange. It is certainly not a black shade issue as RCX, Resolve, PPCS6 and other see the footage correctly.
 
Hey thanks guys! Email is being funky and I only just got a stream of notifications from both the forums and some other stuff and I got some time to respond here for a bit.

David Battistella said:
Have you tried the same shots and project on another computer with a video card or an iMac, or a nMP.

if this is happening on one model, with a specific graphics card, then that is a different story. I have never seen this on. 17" MacBook, a Mac Pro or an iMac, so it might be isolated to how the graphics card on the specific machine is handling the debayer.

This is would have to be resolved in the REDcode plugin.

Battistella
Click to expand...
No my retina MacBook Pro is my main machine...although I could give it a spin on my older 2010 MacBook Pro for sure.

Patrick Grossien said:
Why are you using REDgamma and REDgamma2 in the first place?
Have you tried checking it with REDlog and REDgamma3?
Click to expand...
I would use REDlog or REDgamma3 or 2 but as I said in my original post those were causing the issue and the creative cow thread suggested I change to REDgamma, although that only seams to be sorting out the issue slightly.

David Battistella said:
I've seen a couple of these shots on my machine and it does not display this way in fcp x.

What OS are you running?
What version of fcp x?
How much ram?
which version of the REDcode plugin? Latest? Reinstalled?
Which MacBook retina?
what are the compression settings in the metadata of the r3d's
how was the metadata set prior to import into fcpx? That has an effect for sure and if you tweak in RCX you have to reimport if you want to see the changes)
who dp'd these shots? Do you know about their lighting levels and ratios?

sorry, these are just a few of the questions that come up when I see extremely inflammatory thread titles. :)

battistella
Click to expand...
No problem with the questions...I do allot of problem solving on other forums so I'm used to it. I'm running FCP X 10.0.8 on Mac OS X 10.8.5. I have a early 2013 retina MacBook Pro with 8GB's of RAM and a 2.4GHz i7 Quad Core Processor, it features both Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics for basic tasks and an Nvidia GeForce GT 650M card for heavier lifting. Most of the compression settings in the .r3d's are 18:1, only a few sequences are 7:1 or 3:1, I thought that might be the issue but it seams to effect the ones that are compressed lighter as well (ie: 7:1 and 3:1). The shots were samples from a thread here on REDUser (I think the person who provided them is in here). I have the latest version of the REDcode plugin but I suppose maybe reinstalling it would help. I've heard 10.0.8 a minor glitch compared to 10.0.7 and 10.0.9 but not sure of the specifics. What type of metadata specifically should I tweak in RCX though?

Michael Romano said:
Its a FCPX / OSX / Video Card Driver glitch for sure. I've seen it on two different (Haswell and prior) rMBP's, an iMac and two MacPros with QUADRO 4000 / GTX 680's. It seems to not appear on others at random. All these machines had a mix of GPU, OSX versions and drivers. Very strange. It is certainly not a black shade issue as RCX, Resolve, PPCS6 and other see the footage correctly.
Click to expand...

Yeah Premiere Pro CS6 has no problem with it, and even in FCP X it sees 90% of the footage normal until I rendered out to ProRes and other codecs and saw the horrible artifacting :O Man and the slightly ironic thing is I JUST got my machine back from the genius bar after the 650M started giving me kernel panics whenever I used it! I haven't had any issues with the new GPU though
 
Could be FCP X 10.0.8. Are you on Mavericks?

The upgrade to 10.0.9 might help this.

Battistella
 
I have read a few posts here complaining of the same and in each case it was limited to the retina MacBook Pro. None that I recall were able to pinpoint the source of the problem, so the remedy was to move to another system.
 
David Battistella said:
Could be FCP X 10.0.8. Are you on Mavericks? The upgrade to 10.0.9 might help this. Battistella
Click to expand...
No Mavericks, unfortunetly I have some audio software that simply does not play nice with Mavericks (its not being updated anymore). I just reinstalled the REDplugins, updated to 10.0.9, played with CUDA and re-updated it. Good news is its faster now and RED Dragon footage is visible and doesn't crash. But I still have to see if I can get this to export without looking all ugly and blue :O As soon as I export a quicktime I'll update...Thanks for the help I really appreciate it.

EDIT: After the updates still having issues all though if I keep everything at REDGamma I have no issues what so ever with the blue with the exception of one shot:

This is a 2K .R3D file so maybe the upscaling is messing up or something...anyways if I go back to the clips original settings on all the other ones which is a mix of REDGamma 2 and REDGamma 3 then I get back to this:

No problems with RED Dragon footage so far....just strange to me.
 
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Sam Mestman - WMM said:
Just a heads up... I had a mac mini where this issue went away after I upgraded to Mavericks and the new version of X... although I realize this may not be helpful in every case if you can't go to Mavericks yet.
Click to expand...

On a mini too then... Do they have much in common with the laptops?
 
Bob Gundu said:
Yeah these issue were from a wIile ago. Definitely update everything. Also, are you using any funky plugins?
Click to expand...
No plugins at all were used.

I know one laptop might not be allot to you guys but for me Its significant so "oh just switch computers" is not easy. That said I appreciate the advice. This has got to be driver and software related, I cant believe Apple is aware of this as the retina MBP is such a great computer for a DIT or Editor when on set. There own website even has examples of people editing REDCODE using FCP X specifically on rMBP's. I will definitely report the issue and possibly head back to the genius bar just to show them in person, I have seen video editors there everytime. I guess ill be transcoding in RCX or using Premiere Pro! Anyone have any other thoughts?
 
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