HD For Indies

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One of the things I'd been advocating as a workflow was to capture as native media via FireWire (such as for DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD, etc.). Do your offline in the native codec, then you can use Media Manager in Final Cut Pro to simply re-write the file to uncompressed. I felt so smart and smug to have figured this out, you can even Delete Unused Media to reduce the amount of footage converted...but it turns out, it doesn't do it as expected. It does it WRONG.

Retimed shots messed up? Used to do it, purportedly finally fixed with 5.1.2. So what goes wrong?

If you do this, you'll clip your highlights over 100 IRE - I just tested to verify. Dammit. So any so called "Super White" values will get clipped off. Not scaled, clipped. So you're losing highlight values.

...and it is completely invisible to the naked eye when comparing before/after images in FCP. So why does it matter? Because if you want to darken up the shot, you can retrieve some of that highlight info detail. If clipped and you wish to darken, it is gone forever.

There are cumbersome one-shot-at-a-time workarounds, as Stu suggests in his DV Rebel's Guide book, but I wouldn't want to have to go through all that - be faster just to batch recapture...which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place.

It boils down to a color space and QuickTime issue - in YUV space, you can have SuperWhite values. In RGB, you can't reall y (at least as QuickTime typically operates). When exporting via QuickTime, if it touches the QuickTime architecture, it is getting converted to an RGB color space along the way, and the SuperWhites are clipped.

If you never read my original 10 bit QuickTime in After Effects article, it is good reading as well for pertinent issues for high quality workflow issues as well.

More test notes - if you Media Manager Recompress To from one 10 bit 4:2:2 codec to another, Super Whites aren't clipped, they survive. But that's not a very helpful scenario for what I'm describing.

I tested DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD, and HDV, and they all clipped - most likely because of the above mentioned conversion issue - to transcode it bumps it through an RGB space, and you lose your highlight goodies.

As I said..hell, hell, hell...here's to hoping Apple might make a huge change to their QuickTime architecture to fix this for NAB...yeah, doubt it.

This revises a significant chunk of workflow-ery that I'd been banking on for quite some time, and raises further complicating issues as well - without handling shots one at a time the Stu way, in order to ensure you maintain full highlight detail for uncompressed post workflow, you'd need to recapture from tape via HD-SDI whenever possible. This opens further complications, esp. if you shot 24p - unless you shot on a camera that can kick out psF frames from the studio deck (and AFAIK HDV, DVCPRO HD, and XDCAM HD decks do NOT), you're in trouble - you'd have to capture 60 fps (1080i60 or 720p60) then try to remove pulldown...and oops, how are you going to do that? Again, the QT processing would clip it.

OK, here's a challenge for all you folks out there - how DO you optimally post these formats in Final Cut Pro if you can't ingest native 24p over HD-SDI?

The only solution I can think of so far is to make a dupe of the sequence, modify the sequence settings to the desired final format, then you'd have to change some aspect ratio stuff on all the clips, adjust some other timeline settings, then Render All to get a playable version. Every change you'd make would then require a render. Possible, but time consuming and sucky as compared to the convenience of my other approach...but highlights are maintained (yeah I checked). It does seem to follow one of Stu's rules - Respect Thine Pixel.

Anybody got a better way to handle this? Chime away in the Comments (use link below).

Of course, my brain will be churning on this as I watch SuperBowl ads...

-mike

UPDATE 1:
-exporting, clip by clip, from Timeline, Browser, or Viewer windows maintains Super Whites if re-imported directly into FCP
-double triple checking, taking same clip and Recompress To does not - SO - while QT is related, it isn't inherently involved - FCP has a native YUV (OK really Y'CbCr, but that's a pain to type) pipline, but clearly Recompress To in Media Manager does NOT.
-MAKING PROGRESS - I think I've found a way...gotta test some more, and make sure can relink to an Offlined project and have it all work...

UPDATE 2 - there's TONS of useful Comments, go read'em. Also, Stu just posted:

ProLost: Linear Color Workflow in AE7, Part 5

which folds in some related issues

as well as

Stu, writer of Colorista, writes and shows on ProLost one way to address the problem by compressing the video range - but only AFTER you're in a high precision YUV space (fix it in Timeline Settings in the Video tab).

And there's always this crap to worry about when taking files out of Final Cut Pro as well

Labels: advanced, FCP, post, workflow