Issues with coloring 5d footage in final cut pro

N

noam

Well-known member
If anyone has any suggestions for me, they would be greatly appreciated.

I recently produced and edited a corporate project shot on the 5D. The DP shot the footage VERY warm, so I had to do a lot of work in post to cool down the colors. I did some of the color correction with Magic Bullet looks and some inside of Final Cut.

Everything looked fine and I outputted a 1080p ProRes file which looked great. I then brought that ProRes file back into final cut and burned a DVD straight out of final cut (using the share feature).

I played it back and the colors were very saturated.. Particularly reds and warmer tones were overly saturated.. I've had issues burning things before where the colours seemed to have shifted, but nothing this drastic.

I've tried exporting the timeline in many different formats now and then re-burning it, all with the same issues.

I've now decided to export it using compressor as an uncompressed 10 bit file, and burn that. BUT when it finished saving out, the colors look even stranger on this version. If anything, some of the shots look too cold.

Am I missing something? I've been editing for 5 years and spent a year working at an online studio working with 5D footage all the time and I've never seen this.

Any ideas??
 
Sounds like your monitors are uncalibrated. The look after the DVD is probably correct or the monitor on the DVD you are viewing it on could be uncalibrated. Can you fill us in with details. How calibrated is your system? Is each monitor calibrated. Also are you just color correcting only on the computer monitors without a broadcast type of monitor view out of the editing system?
 
draven,

Thanks for your feedback. You are absolutely right about my monitors being uncalibrated, and that definitely accounts for some of the color difference, but the difference is SO drastic that I have a feeling something else is coming into play here.. I will try to load some screenshots at some point for you to see the difference..

I have been color correcting to my computer monitor because the main usage of this video will be for web. They client however has requested a couple of DVD Screeners for their own viewing purposes..

Again, my main concern is not that there is a difference in color, but how dramatically different it is. I'll give you one example of a shot:

One of our shots is of a talking head on a white screen. The shot was initially SO warm that the white screen looked nearly orange. With magic bullet looks I applied a warm/cool filter and adjusted the lift/gamma/gain to get the skin tones right. This left the background very blue-ish. I then applied a gradual exposure to the background to blow it out and eliminate the blue. I thought this would be simpler and easier than color replacing in different software. It works in the timeline and the outputted mov file, but again the DVD and uncompressed file are totally off - in different ways. On the DVD version, the skin tones on that shot are still very warm, with the background looking white. But on the uncompressed version, the skintones look fine, with the background looking blue! Sort of how it did in Magic Bullet, before I applied the gradual exposure..

Hmmm..
 
Update: I've just saved out an uncompressed version straight from final cut, without using compressor. This versions colors seem fine in comparison to the compressor 10 bit version. I'm wondering if compressor bypasses the magic bullet filter to a certain extent?

I'm going to try authoring a DVD from this latest version.. fingers crossed.
 
noam said:
Particularly reds and warmer tones were overly saturated.
Click to expand...

The sensor on the 5D tends to blow out reds, so that's an issue with the camera not your editing skills. As for the warm tones, I have had to correct things like this before (gotta love students) and I have found that the easiest way is to desaturate (not a whole lot) and then color correct. Good luck!
 
Everything looked fine and I outputted a 1080p ProRes file which looked great. I then brought that ProRes file back into final cut and burned a DVD straight out of final cut (using the share feature).
Click to expand...

Your problem in the quote above indicates that all was well until the DVD. That leads me to believe that since you saw the DVD outside of your computer that the problem is either the monitor that the DVD is playing back on or the monitors that you are using to color correct on, on the computer. Unless you saw this problem on the computer after you made the prores and brought it back into final cut. Could also be a setting in compressor.

In addition to this it can also be how it was shot on set. Did you notice the excess red when shooting?
 
Thanks again for all the advice from both of you.

Draven - I did try the DVD on two separate TV's as well as my computer monitors.. all with the same issue.

To answer your question, yes there was definitely excess red on the camera on the day of. Both myself and the DP had suggested to the director to cool off the shots in camera, but unfortunately that wasn't done!

The good news is I have solved the problem in this particular case. I saved out an uncompressed 10 bit mov file directly from Final Cut Pro and burned that. It looks amazing.. That was one of the few settings I hadn't initially tried saving out of final cut. What I found very strange though, as I mentioned earlier was that using the exact same settings, compressor seemed to be "overlooking" some of the color correction settings and filters for some strange reason. So although I've solved the problem for this project, I would still like to get to the bottom of this to avoid future headaches..
 
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