Exporting for FCP keeping the same colour....?!

D

Drcoffee

Well-known member
I don't ask for much, just to be able to export from final cut to be viewed on Mac/pc and retain the look it did in final cut, without drastic gamma shifts. I have currently been using h.264 which drives me mental.

What is the / smallest / highest quality / less colour change, codec to export with?

Cheers
Jon
 
are you judging what it looks like compared to the canvas window in FCP or against a broadcast monitor connected to FCP?

if it's the first option, then you will always see stuff differently because the canvas cannot be trusted. get a broadcast monitor.

if it's the second, check the broadcast monitor's calibration, check the computer monitor's calibration, and try again.
 
There are a number of articles about this on the Pro Video Coalition site. Just search for "Quicktime Gamma Shift." Much of this may have become obsolete with Snow Leopard, however, which uses a gamma of 2.2 instead of the traditional Mac OS gamma of 1.8. There is at least one article on the PVC site about how gamma is handled in Snow Leopard. What version of the operating system are you running?

Kevin
 
I'm running Leopard (Not snow) Will upgrade and check out your advice Kevin, Cheers

I have a broadcast monitor attached (Panasonic CRT), SD component out from a Blackmagic Intensity Pro from a HD timeline, using the colour bars from FCP to calibrate. Can this be trusted as the truest colour? It's HDV and GH1 HD footage I'm using....?

Cheers
Jon
 
The best I've found is H.264.

BUT-

I've found that using the "Export using QT conversion" option will always produce a gamma shift (and I'll do it sometimes and kick the contrast up to +4 to compensate for a quick export), but for final versions, I use the "Export QT movie" (using current settings) THEN, use QT pro to export the h.264 from the master file and it produces no shift.

I haven't tried exporting through compressor, but that might work, I just like the simplicity of QT pro. Hope this helps.

This will make it look the same from the canvas to the QT player, but monitor calibration is another issue entirely, and will affect how it looks on everything else.

I strongly encourage you to invest in something like the Pantone Huey pro. Ever since I bought one, my color correction has been a 100 times better, and the picture looks correct on many different systems.
 
Drcoffee said:
SD component out from a Blackmagic Intensity Pro from a HD timeline
Click to expand...

SD and HD are different color spaces...

I would also make sure you have the computer monitors calibrated (with a spyder or huey) so that you know the problem isn't with their setup either.
 
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