FCS2 - Color aspect ratio problem

Kegan

Kegan

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Hey everyone. I thought I'd give it a shot to see if you guys can help me out. It's been pretty frustrating couple hours to say the least.

So, today I used Apple's Color for the first time and it was great! Tons of potential and I haven't even fully learned the basics.

Anyway, I render all the footage, hadn't messed with the geometry tab at all and decided to send it back to FCP. It goes back to Final Cut, color corrected...but, its now full screen instead of widescreen as it was shot. The sequence settings are all correct, but I think Color and Final Cut are somehow not communicating well with each other for sequence settings or something.

It was footage shot with a Canon XH-A1, 108024p and captured that way. The original sequence/timeline is widescreen natively and the quality is good. When coming back from Color though, it just changes aspect ratio and I can't for the life of me figure out why.

If anybody can help, that'd be greatly appreciated,

Kegan
 
bump, anyone? Do you need more information or is it just a rare occurrence?

-Kegan
 
In case, anybody else has this problem later on...there's a thread ongoing at the HV20/30 forums that directly relates to this. So far, no solution has been found, but maybe it will shortly. It appears that it may have something to do with the files being HDV.

http://www.hv20.com/showthread.php?t=15856

-Kegan
 
Kegan Sant said:
HWhen coming back from Color though, it just changes aspect ratio and I can't for the life of me figure out why.
Click to expand...
There's a checkbox for anamorphic under the clip settings or properties or format (FCP timeline).
I think if you control click on a clip it will bring up a menu for format, properties, etc. Sorry I'm doing this from memory and I haven't used Color. I was just wondering if somehow during the roundtrip (to Color and back) the anamorphic setting became unchecked.
 
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This is a bit unrelated, but hopefully it helps someone:

Very valuable tip I got recently about the Geometry tab in Color: do NOT use it when rendering out your footage, unless you are doing pan-and-scan type operations. Even then, you might do better scaling it up somewhere else (FCP, After Effects, whatever). The reason is that the Geometry tab has a nasty way of softening footage during output, even when not scaling footage.

I ran into this because I was grading some non-flipped 35mm adapter footage, and using the Geometry tab to rotate everything 180 degrees. Upon render, my footage looked noticeable softer. When I went back into Color and reset the Geometry on all shots (you can do this quickly by resetting it on one shot and then doing a Copy to All), then restarting Color and re-rendering, my footage got its original sharpness back.

So my advice would be, if you need the 180-degree rotation for grading reference, that's perfectly okay, but reset everything in Geometry and then save/close/re-open before your final render. Try it both ways and I think you'll find, your stuff suddenly looks a lot better without it. A major Color gotcha.
 
Thanks guys.

milksac: The anamorphic tab is unchecked when looking in FCP, but when you check it, it becomes distorted. It seems to be a common problem amongst Canon HDV users (not sure of Sony and JVC HDV users though). No one has really seem to come up with a resolution.

Oedipax: I haven't touched anything in the Geometry tab, but thanks for the tip. When I do go into that tab in the future, I will make sure to follow your steps to get the best looking image.

Hoping to figure this out soon,

Kegan
 
Try transcoding a section of your HDV timeline into ProRes and send that to Color to see what happens. As you've already found out, HDV is not an approved format to use w/Color.

-A
 
adkimery said:
Try transcoding a section of your HDV timeline into ProRes and send that to Color to see what happens. As you've already found out, HDV is not an approved format to use w/Color.

-A
Click to expand...

This is what I used to do. But I would use a prores timeline to begin with.
 
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