WB wrong in QT/FCP -

[James Page]

Hi

I'm editing footage that was shot last year, i.e. before Build 21.

I'm trying to do 1 lights in either redalert or clipfinder, and then generate proxies to edit in FCP7.

Everytime i make any changes to the white balance, in red alert or clipfinder the footage looks fine, but the proxies in quicktime / fcp look massively tinted, either too blue or too orange.

What can i do? I read elswhere that its todo with the new colour science, but this was shot before that colour science was introduced, so i'm at a loss.

Please help!

Thanks

Jim

 

[Ben Brainerd]

The key thing to remember here is that the New Color Science (NCS) affects the post tools as well. So as soon as you opened your older footage in a relatively new version of RedAlert, you applied NCS to it, and thus brought yourself into "funky proxy land"

 

[Ian Andolina]

As Ben mentions, FCP is still using the old quicktime plugin, thus the old color science. A newer version with NCS is coming soon!

Also, are your proxy files in FCP wrapped (ala log & transfer native), or did you just drag them in? So annoyed was I with some bad first-light wrapped footage log&transfered last year, I reconformed with the camera quicktime proxies so I could get a more sensible colorspace to look at (you can regenerate camera proxies whenever you want using clipfinder/redalert, whereas wrapped proxies are forever burned with whatever setting were specified). Adjusting in Redalert can never correct wrapped proxies...

The important point is that if you are finishing in Color, you'll end up with the original RAW files anyway and the cplorcasts you see in FCP won't matter.

 

[James Page]

Thankyou both for replying. That makes much more sense! I was under the mistake impression that the NCS was based on what the cameras captured, not the way it was processed.

I'm using Quicktime "camera" proxies, not wrapped, for spped and flexibility, so i guess its just a case of waiting for the NCS?

 

[Ben Brainerd]

I'm using Quicktime "camera" proxies, not wrapped, for spped and flexibility, so i guess its just a case of waiting for the NCS?

Something like that. Though like Ian said, once you go into Color, you're back in RAW land anyways. Changes made in RedAlert/Clipfinder won't carry over into Color, so pretty much all you're doing with those proxies is making them look moderately decent for editing purposes.

 

[Ian Andolina]

And to keep the one-two tag team action with Ben going, even when we get the NCS plugin in FCP, I suspect there are some gamma and colour space bugs (well proxies don't pick up gamma and curve changes in RA anyway) that will stop things looking identical anyway! (I'd be very happy to be proved wrong).

One important point to note in my case editing with camera proxies, I ended up with obscure bugs causing both crashes and unfixable frozen frames in Color[1]. The paranoiac in me would recommend you double-check you can round-trip with Color just in case.

----
[1] Probably due to the fact I re-conformed from a wrapped proxy to a camera proxy project which won't affect you.