Major Quality Loss On Footage After Color Grading

Chris_Marrs_Piliero

Chris_Marrs_Piliero

Well-known member
I've got a bunch of footage shot with my 7D and whenever I color grade it (magic bullets or as simple as color corrector) after render the quality of the footage gets destroyed. I can apply the color grade and not hit render and in the viewer it looks great, but once I render it, it immediately is losing quality.

Anyone have this issue? What the heck is going on here?
 
Are you transcoding the footage to ProRes or something similar before you edit and grade?

What are your sequence settings?
 
nope... i was just doing it on the raw footage right out of the cam... my computer's powerful enough to play the clips so i didn't feel like i needed to do that... is that what everyone is doing? i searched and didn't find much on people saying they had to convert to prores before grading...
 
Actually most people transcode to ProRes/Cineform/DNxHD/etc. even if they have the latest quad-core computers.

The native color space of the H.264 files uses 4:2:0 color space, on top of the heavy image compression. ProRes is 4:2:2 and far, far less compressed. So that could make a big difference. But also I'm concerned about what your sequence settings are. I feel that the problem is more likely there.
 
hmmmm... well I'm just dragging the clips to a new sequence and having the sequence match the settings of the clip... btw, thanks for the fast help...
 
Well that's the problem. If your sequence setting is h264 then it will also render everything to h264 and the quality gets destroyed...
 
Shoot in a flat high dynamic range picture style in the first place. If you don't do that you will have instant problems with grading.

Grade in a 10 bit 4:2:2 color sampling space. quality of your grades/corrections/effects will be better.
 
so the better the shooting conditions obviously the better the end product and the better it will deal with grading, but in the end, the default sequence for these h264 clips just won't cut it... for proper end results i have to convert it to apple pro res...
 
Chris_Marrs_Piliero said:
so the better the shooting conditions obviously the better the end product and the better it will deal with grading, but in the end, the default sequence for these h264 clips just won't cut it... for proper end results i have to convert it to apple pro res...
Click to expand...
See if the same thing happens when you edit with ProRes instead of the native H.264. Then we'll know conclusively whether the codec is the culprit or not.
 
This doesn't explain why it looked great in the viewer even before. Seems to suggest that your encoding settings were off.
 
Chris_TC said:
This doesn't explain why it looked great in the viewer even before. Seems to suggest that your encoding settings were off.
Click to expand...


well based off of what maarek said about the sequence being h264, thus it rendering the graded image h264, that makes sense, right?

i'm not sure what encoding settings you would be referring to when all i did was drag the clips from my compact flash card onto my harddrive, opened up final cut, imported the clips, dragged the clips into the sequence, and told it to match the sequence to the clips properties.

anyone out there grade their footage straight outta the camera and it doesn't get all super muddy afterwards???
 
Chris_TC said:
This doesn't explain why it looked great in the viewer even before. Seems to suggest that your encoding settings were off.
Click to expand...

the lcd viewer is very deceptive, footage can look much sharper and cleaner than it really is.
 
Remember folks- H.264 is a highly compressed format out of the camera. Your best bet for a good color grade with high latitude is to transcode to a format more suited to manipulation in post- like ProRes or 10-bit uncompressed. Otherwise every filter and color correction you make as H.264 results in yet another level of heavy compression and worse noise/lower quality.

Noah
 
You don't necessarily have to set your sequence to match your clip properties. Start a new sequence first, SD, HD, it doesn't matter, just make sure it is something common like DV NTSC, or DVCProHD, etc... Then import a clip that you wish to grade. Apply the grade and then export using the same sequence settings. Check the exported video clip in Final Cut, not in Quicktime or any other third party player, and see if that changes anything. I've done plenty of color correction and grading with native AVCHD video clips and have concluded that certain filters and effects work better than others. They are not all created equal.
 
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What about when using adobe premiere CS4? What is the best way to convert the raw footage? someone mentioned MPEG streamclip but i dont know which setting to use.
 
Ok so here's the workflow I've adopted... I have the sequence match the settings of the clips so that it is native and I don't need to render the clips for playback. Then when I'm done editing, I throw them onto a ProRes timeline, apply my color correcting and then render that out and it looks top notch. It's the rendering in the native h264 timeline that is messing things up.
 
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