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 :)

SnowLeopard _ 2.2

Z

zak forrest

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 3, 2007
Messages
1,161
Reaction score
0
Points
0
Website
www.zf-films.com
so now that Snow Leopard is out, what is the deal with gamma and quicktime and 2.2 and all that stuff? I thought when snow leopard came out all those issues would go away, but i still have that checkbox in my quicktime prefs "enable final cut color etc" and its a confusing mess. can anyone shed light on this?

i was hoping to upgrade to snow leopard, and have everything be in 2.2 gamma, but im worried quicktime is still all over the map. anyone know about this??
 
No, there are no answers there. I, too, am curious as to why an OS that would supposedly fix the gamma discrepancies now causes my clips to be displayed at three different brightnesses, instead of two. QT7, QTX, and FCP all display differently (FCP being the darkest and worst of them all).
 
I don't know what's happening with your system but my files look identical in QTX, QT7 and FCP7 and pretty darn close to my Sony CRT grading monitor via HD-SDI from a Blackmagic card. I see no difference when enabling "Use final cut color" in QT7.
I did however calibrate my screen using an EyeOne system to a 2.2 gamma.
 
The default 2.2 gamma is a huge step in the right direction. I have one system up and running with SL now and it's nice to see that Apple is finally making attempts at fixing the gamma mess. I can concur with Evin, all my stuff looks identical between FCP, RED tools, QTX, QT7... My monitors are calibrated with a Spyder3 Elite.

There does seem to still be some differences in the gamma or how files look within After Effects CS4, but Premiere seems to match just fine. When I render out via AE, the look seems to still match what was done in Premiere, so not sure what's up there, but I really haven't tested this fully just yet. I finally got all the apps reinstalled onto this system last night.
 
Evin Grant said:
I don't know what's happening with your system but my files look identical in QTX, QT7 and FCP7 and pretty darn close to my Sony CRT grading monitor via HD-SDI from a Blackmagic card. I see no difference when enabling "Use final cut color" in QT7.
I did however calibrate my screen using an EyeOne system to a 2.2 gamma.
Click to expand...

What kind of (computer) monitor do you have (not the Sony CRT)? EyeOne will work with Apple displays?
 


No brightness issues here.
 
QuickTime7 Player's FCP compatibility check box is for up to FCP6. FCP6 adjust the gamma from 1.8 to 2.2 automatically, but QT7 player doesn't, so to match the look of the clip you made in FCP6, Apple made the check box to do it. That means the clips were usually (not all format though, that is why it's confusing) made with 1.8 gamma.

So, if you have everything new, Snow Leopard, QTX, FCS3, then as Andrae demonstrated, they all match under gamma 2.2.

So when you output from FCP7 then open it in QTX would be fine, then when you open it with QT7 then no checkbox then it's fine, but if you have the check box, it will be 2.68 gamma because the check box will multiple the gamma by 1.222222222222222.
 
Alan,

It gets confusing when people think gamma handling is a bug, it was actually under certain manner that could be understood.
 
Alexis Hanawalt said:
Quicktime X does not actually have any preferences available to set, correct? I don't see any preference pane in system preferences or a preferences option when I open the new quicktime player.
Click to expand...

You are correct... it doesn't.
 
I've generally come to the conclusion that Pro Apps and the QuickTime team are more or less going their separate ways. You'll notice that ProRes, as a codec, now falls under ProApps jurisdiction and not the QT team.

After I upgraded to FCP 7, I ran into a number of odd gamma issues when using QT to do a conversion. For example, converting a PhotoJPEG stock footage file to ProRes resulted in a gamma shift ONLY when any rendering was required in the FCP timeline. The same conversion, using the same QT version was fine in FCP 6.0.6 after rendering. So, obviously there's something funky under the hood. In further testing, I've found that the same conversion using Compressor 3.5 was fine. The moral of the story is to forget about QuickTime for any conversions from now on.

The underlying architecture will certainly continue, but the front-facing side of QT has gone consumer and probably is losing its usefulness in any and all professional applications. Sure, you can still use QT7, but who knows how much of it is now broken? Purely my opinion of course, but for me, I no longer intend to use QT as the "swiss army knife" that I used to. Stick with Compressor or others.

I think that no matter what the OS does, you can't count on QT to be accurate under any circumstances, because it is looking for certain flags in the image to accurately display the image for the screen. If those flags aren't there or aren't proper, then QT makes certain assumptions and displays accordingly.

- Oliver
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top