Exporting color correction issues.

B

bl4ck m4th

Member
Hey whats up guys. I have been having issues with my color correction work I do in final cut looking different after I export. Within my project in final cut it looks great, but then when i export it into a quicktime video, in many cases the color correction is really dull, or barely noticable. And i've had to go back and over saturate the actual project for it to look normal after its been exported. Why isn't the color correction just being converted into a quicktime video the same way that it looks within my final cut project?

I know that I should have an external monitor to accurately see what it will look like when put on the internet or what not, but why is it looking different just after exporting it into a quicktime video?

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
 
RGB color space on your desktop is not the same as YUV as it goes out to an NTSC monitor.

Noah
 
CC to a YUV monitor first, may be trough the firewire camera's port to an analog (good one) monitor.

I do this and have nice results:

I connect mi camera trough FW and the camera to a Samsumg 29" (HDTV) monitor
via Componet cables in order to see the resultant colors in NTSC.

Good luck!
 
Ideally cc to a sweet monitor, if this is not an option you can select a particular section of the project cut it out as a clip to a separate part of the time line and multiply it twice. Bracket them, first clip down with the degree of saturation and the third clip up with an equal increment. Then place all three clips over one another crop and reposition them to show the same sections of the shot in the three way split screen. Export all four and burn a DVD of the individuals side by side and the overlaid three clips. When you view this on your TV monitor through your DVD player you'll be able to tell if it needs to be saturated more or less by comparison of the shots.

I find the best way to deal with the saturation of footage, is to over lay the clip with a duplicate of itself on the same time line. Mach first frame to first frame drop the opacity of the upper clip to 20%. Apply cc to that one at a more sever rate than usual. Because the opacity has dropped so much, blacks disappear, shadows are just noticeable and highlight's detail comes out. This means that hardly any if at all noise would survive the opacity drop and the eventual cc effect I find is a lot kinder on the finished look, as in it preserves much more detail with a lot less color distortion than applying a saturation change through a cc effect directly to the clip.
 
I was thinking about getting the Matrox mxo. What are your opinions/ what have you heard about it? Do you think that would be a good choice? Please let me know, your opinions are greatly valued!
 
Matrox are great I personally have an old Perhilia 256 card in my old PC used to use it for PremierPro editing. It still works great and shows little signs of aging in its performance compared to many other currant video cards.
I'm not very familiare with their MXO but from what I've read it is like a newer version of a video card that operates outside of the computer. Not sure how it's working of the DVI out will affect its accuracy, but it seams like for monitoring yes this would be a great solution. Think I read about an MXO2 with many more inputs and outputs may be worth it.

If your already spending $$$ might be worth your while getting a decklink new ones have HDMI as well as component and SDI in HD/SD. Monitoring will be easier as you'll have a huge variety of outputs check out the Blackmagic website.
 
Open QT

Under QT Player menu choose preferences

Window will pop up ... last item on the list is Final Cut Color compatability - select it.

Done.


I know everyone above gave good advice regarding monitoring - but this will specifically correct the issue youre talking about where a played QT file will look washed out and not show the contrast / colors you see in FCP.
 
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