HD For Indies

I was scanning through my news stuff online yesterday, and came across an updated version of Au Naturel, a set of plugins for FCP, AE, and combustion. The set of plugins does some useful things, including (to my interest) some more realistic blur and exposure controls as compared to what FCP or After Effects do on their own. Internally, the plugin works in a 32 bit/channel float space (extended detail in shadow and highlights, this is the best way to get accurate results). I emailed to ask the author (Darrin) whether the plugin would return 10 bit results if used on a 10 bit timeline in Final Cut Pro, and 16 bit results if used with a 16 bit in After Effects. As expected, the answer was as follows.

Darrin responded:

Yes, it will return 16-bit per channel data to AE (After Effects) if you're working in 16-bit per channel mode. And sadly, in FCP, it only has the option to return data in 8-bit RGB. It can't produce 10-bit RGB or 10-bit YUV.


I then asked for further detail about FCP, he responded:

I'm not sure there is a way to do all these things (generate 10 bit 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 results in FCP) natively in FCP at this time. Basically, they'd have to be done using FCP's FXScript. The problem with FXScript is that you can only use it for full-frame actions. You can't get at the individual pixels. For something like the blurs, that's probably not too much of a problem (except for edge handling), but for the compositing and transformations, it would pretty much be impossible to do them, as far as I can tell. Plus, you wouldn't get the extended range allowing you to go above the maximum or below the minimum values. Realistically, I don't see it being possible unless Apple makes some big changes and starts giving developers a lot more information. (Or, if they just upsampled the 10-bit data to 16-bit data and passed that to the plugin, it could work right now.)

And that in a nutshell explains some of the limits of what you can do within Final Cut Pro at this time. It's own built-in effects will only handle RGB at a maximum of 8 bits/channel (256 levels of gray or color) as opposed to 10 bits/channel (1024 levels of gray of color). Apple gives developers two ways to make plug-ins (pieces of code that integrate into the program and extend it's capabilities) for Final Cut Pro: FCP supports the After Effects plugin model, so plugins that work in After Effects will (usually) work in Final Cut Pro, or programmers can write plugins specifically for Final Cut Pro using FXScript.

The After Effects plugin stuff only supports 8 bits per channel, period. So no 10 bit anything, and everything 8 bit gets processed from YUV to RGB and back to YUV, which is bad, because there isn't a way to convert YUV-RGB-YUV and have the same colors you started with, even if you didn't "do anything" to the color information while it was in RGB.

The FXScript stuff does let you manipulate 10 bit data (in YUV or RGB as well? Not sure his "10bit data to 16-bit" fully answered that), but it has it's limitations. Apple would need to extend the API (Application Programming Interface) to give developers the hooks into the code they needed to drag out the control they want.

So all this means that Final Cut Pro is hindered at present from being a one stop solution for precise color correction work. That is why I wrote up that post on how to get Final Cut Pro HD timelines into After Effects using the Automatic Duck products.

That's it for today. Or actually, wow, that's it for the year. See you all next year, have fun tonight!

I'd like to give a heartfelt thanks to everyone who's read the blog this year, and especially to everyone who's written in and contributed. In the past four months, I've had over a quarter of a million pageviews, so somebody out there is reading, and it's appreciated.

-mike