Certain shots offline in Apple Color

Jimmy Pierce

Jimmy Pierce

Well-known member
I have a bit of a dilemma and am hoping this has happened to someone before.

I'm currently doing a grade on a project, and sent the sequence from Final Cut into Color. But when I do, certain shots appear offline in Color.

The raw files look fine. I may just recapture them and see what happens. But just in case, here are a few screenshots to show the strangeness that is occurring.

Screen shot #1 - Final Cut Pro sequence
5752002894_d4f2ca4a91_b_d.jpg


The clips in the highest video track are the ones that appear offline when sent to Color. The footage was captured in ProRes 422 1440x1080 30p 48 khz off HDV mini DV tapes.

But some of these clips were also transcoded from Canon 7D cards.

Screen shot #2 - Apple Color Sequence
5752003158_9b1f609f51_b_d.jpg


As you can see, these clips appear offline. I've had several unsuccessful attempts and am trying to figure out if it's the software or perhaps the way the footage was processed. It was all captured the same way, both the HDV footage and the 7D footage.
 
Make sure they're actually ProRes clips and with no speed changes. H.264 clips will not work with Color.

Noah
 
You said clips in track V2 are offline in Color? You're using Color 1.0, aren't you? Color 1.0 could only recognize clips in track V1, not other tracks. The new version 1.5 will read valid clips from any track.

Since they're just straight cuts, there's no real reason for those clips to be in V2 anyway. Commit to your edits, put them all in V1.
 
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I'm using Color 1.5.3. I should have mentioned this in the first post, but all of the clips are actually in V1. For my demonstration, I separated the clips on V2 to distinguish which shots were showing offline in Color.

The example, by the way, only shows a few clips which are offline in Color. There are actually more earlier in the cut. Earlier today, I encoded every shot that was offline into HDV (they were recorded in HDV anyway) and now they appear online in Color. The only ones that still don't are the ones which you see in the screenshots, the last few shots in the cut.

I'll take a look at the the speed in the shots. They're all ProRes 422. I looked at that first.

The 7D footage is fine. It's only these few shots at the end.

Thanks for the suggestions.
 
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Put everything into ProRes LT, edit your little heart out, you crazy diamond!

Best of luck! And as I end all my articles, "Rock Those Edits!"
 
Jimmy Pierce said:
As you can see, these clips appear offline. I've had several unsuccessful attempts and am trying to figure out if it's the software or perhaps the way the footage was processed. It was all captured the same way, both the HDV footage and the 7D footage.
Click to expand...

Two things:
  1. Color 1.5.x is very capable of working with h.264 originals from the Canon cameras. In fact, it's my preferred workflow (edit with a flavor of ProRes, grade with the h264 originals). That's not your problem (unless the footage has been transcoded - but then, everything else would be offline as well).
  2. The key in Color is usually to find the first clip where something has gone 'wonky' and figure it out from there. Maybe the file directory starting with that clip has a weird character? Maybe there's a variable speed effect? Maybe there's an FCP filter applied that Color should be ignoring but isn't?

In situations like this - divide and conquer.

Put the offending section of the timeline in a new sequence and try again. Then start stripping away any and all variables, until finally you discover what it is. Maybe a freeze frame? Or on oversized JPEG? Etc...

Not the definitives answer you're looking for - but it's not the h.264ness (or shouldn't be).

BTW - to figure out if its a problem with speed changes... look at your V2 track in Color - if the edit points match the FCP timeline, you can generally rule out a speed change issue (which tends to throw out every edit that follows).

HTH.

- patrick
 
And what benefit is there from grading the H.264 files, rather than the ProRes? Color does not, in fact, support H.264, nor did v.1 support multiple tracks of video.
 
I tried separating the clips that appeared offline and added them to a separate sequence, then sending that sequence to Color, and they all appeared offline. I'm not using any clips in H.264, only HDV and ProRes 422. The strange thing is that clips from both cameras appear offline at various points in the cut. What you see on screen is footage shot & captured from HDV tapes, but there are several clips which came from the 7D which also appear offline earlier in the cut. It also appears that each time I send a sequence to Color, different clips appear offline that weren't offline before.
 
What version of Color are you on?
What graphics card are you running on?
Can you reconnect the media manually in Color to make it work?
 
Color version 1.5.3

Graphics card is GeForce 9600M GT

One of the first things I did when I first ran into this issue was reconnecting the media. The shots stayed offline.

If there's any information that would help understand exactly what is on my screen, please let me know.

Just as a review, I'll go over all of the facts.

1. Sent a sequence into Apple Color from FCP.
2. Half of footage was shot in HDV 1080i 30p (imported as HDV ProRes 422), other half was shot on Canon 7D, and imported as ProRes 422 (I'm not familiar with 7D footage, so can't be more detailed than that).
3. Selected clips from both cameras appear offline.
4. Tried re-encoding selected clips into HDV from ProRes 422.
5. Tried reconnected offline clips manually, no success.
 
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Last question. Have you tried putting all clips on V1 and sending? Just as an experiment?

Not sure what HDV ProRes is, HDV is one codec, ProRes is another.

Not the ideal grahpics card, but, not sure if it should be a deal breaker.

Download "Preference Manager" from Digital Rebellion dot com, delete only Color pref files, see if that helps.

Very strange, never seen this exact problem before, but I'm sticking with you till it's resolved.
 
That's where I first discovered the issue. Originally all of the clips were in V1. Then the first experiment trying to resolve it was placing those offline clips in a separate sequence and sending that. When I type HDV ProRes, what I mean is there is a "Easy Setup" which basically captures HDV footage in the ProRes codec, as well as set any sequence you create thereafter to ProRes.

I appreciate your dedication. My next step will probably be re-capturing the footage, which I would hate to do because there's so much of it, even the stuff I initially used in the cut and I have a deadline heading at me like a runaway locomotive, haha.

I may also try placing the cuts in a sequence with different settings, and see if maybe the sequence and/or codec of choice used to capture (ProRes) accounts for this issue. I may also try breaking up the project into scenes. It's a half hour narrative film. Though, I don't see why the length would cause a problem, but I know length sometimes causes other problems.

But honestly, I have never had this issue with Color before, either. I haven't been using it that long, maybe a year or two, give or take, but I've graded standard DV, DVCPRO HD, & HDV. Not ProRes, though.

I'll try deleting the preferences, per your suggestion. Maybe Color was messed around with.
 
I'd use Preference Manager to trash the Color prefs, just to see what happens.

I'd personally NEVER edit a single hour long Sequence. That's not professional workflow. Each Scene from the start really should be it's own Sequence. You should have a Master Sequence, where you'll nest them all together once each Scene Sequence is locked down. That very much could be the problem.

Recapturing won't help, I'm very sure of that. The clips are just fine as is. Cut Scenes into Sequences. Very easy to do from your already existing Master Sequence. Highlight all the clips in a single Scene, then Nest them, giving the Nested Sequence the name of the Scene. Should go pretty quickly. Make a Bin in the Browser called Sequences, throw them all in that Bin to help keep things organized.

I'm betting the length is at least a major part of the problem. Your graphics card isn't the most powerful, so, we may be stressing it out here.
 
I just tried Preference Manager. Clips still showed as offline. Right now I'm re-encoding them as HDV. That seemed to work on some of the offline footage. My gut tells me the footage was captured the wrong way, and it seemed to work in some scenes, but not others. I won't know this until I find a solution, though.

UPDATE 5/26 at 4:16PM PST

Footage back online. I separated the scenes into separate sequences, but that hadn't worked. I'm keeping it that way anyway. The film was originally cut up between sequences, and I had laid them all into one sequence for the final cut. Next step was re-encoding the ProRes footage into HDV. That worked for this last scene. I'm going to try this process with the rest of the offline clips and see what happens and I'll make a new update

5762803683_c5b96f6bca_b_d.jpg


I re-encoded the footage that was showing up offline from ProRes 422 to HDV (it was originally shot in HDV). The codec was the problem. My assistant editor captured the footage, so I'll have to ask him how he did it to clarify what went wrong.

Here's a screenshot of the item properties for another flawed clip. I can't see anything wrong with it, but it obviously caused problems.

5763349312_b1269ebd76_b_d.jpg
 
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I'm glad to see the O.P. solved his problem...

And what benefit is there from grading the H.264 files, rather than the ProRes? Color does not, in fact, support H.264
Click to expand...

Regarding Color and h264 -

Color 1.5.x is indeed capable of grading from h.264 files. Truth. I do it all the time.

Why grade from h264?

Why not?

As a professional finisher - I always want to get as close to the camera negative as I can. Every transcode is a possibility for errors. The net is filled with people comparing different gamma corrections depending if they transcode with Compressor vs Streamclip vs Whatever...

If I can avoid all that nonsense by avoiding transcoding in the first place - sign me up.

The real issue in an h264 workflow is planning the relink back to the camera originals. Often, editors will rename their transcoded clips and then re-linking can be a real nightmare.

But I've had great experiences inside Color with h.264 originated material. I highly recommend it. Just render out 10-bit to a ProResLT or better (I prefer 422HQ, but that's me) and you're golden.

- patrick
 
That's why we use ProRes. It's totally lossless, keeps gamma, bit depth, etc, matched to the original, and can be transcoded over and over and over without generational loss. One coded, no need for offline, makes life super simple and easy.

There is no such thing as a camera negative anymore, just digital data. That's a pretty complex workflow I have to say. Often editors will, actually, go ProRes first, stick with it through the full post-production process. 10-bit HQ out of Color is good if you're going into some serious Motion/AE/3D compositing work. Otherwise, it doesn't buy you any more data than what the camera recorded originally.
 
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