Conversion not maintaining Color????
 

Hi,
I have a problem and I was wondering if anyone can help out. Just to you give you an idae what Im working with. I'm using a Canon 5D MK2. I use FCP 6 to edit. I make my conversion for editing using MPEG StreamClip.

The issue: When I'm done editing I like to compress my video so I can post it on YouTube or my favorite vimeo.com. But I'm having an issue. After I do my compression I seem to lose some color in my video. The colors do not pop off the screen like they do when I'm editing and viewing it in the canvas.
I know what your going to say. When you compress you lose some details. Well please look at this video shot on a 5D and compressed to upload to video. The colors are screaming off the screen. My question. How do I compress my edited 5D MK2 footage to look like this for vimeo? I would love to get an answer to this question.

Thank You,

Tom Marks

Tom,

This is a long-standing bug in FCP/Compressor where your final output lacks saturation/gamma as seen in the canvas/viewer. There's a few different ways to compensate for this and depending on your hardware setup - or lack of - you'll have to pick the one that fits your needs. Use the "search" feature here on the forum and you'll find dozens of posts about this issue and how best to deal with it (too much info to retype here).

Few thoughts, I'm sure others will chime in.

There is a gamma issue with FCP which can play all sorts of tricks on you when switching between the canvas and an external viewer like Vimeo or even QT. Can't remember what the fix is but if you google it, it may solve part of the issue you're having.

Next, your example vid was graded extremely well. That's probably the most overlooked step in outputting video. Color is a pretty deep app but worth knowing for that kind of quality. 3-way CC in FCP can fix minor things but is not up to the task of true grading. A good monitor (not computer) is a requirement.

If I read your post accurately, you say you've traced the problem to the compression phase...what are you using to compress the vid and what are your settings? There are a lot of options that you may be overlooking in Compressor or QT that may bring back some of the "pop"

I thought that the gamma issue in FCP was solved when they changed the gamma to 2.2 in Snow leopard?

Cheers

Hans

We all hoped that but all it did was give the desktop environment a change, not how pro apps handle gamma. Like I say it's a long-standing bug; one can only hope that it finally gets addressed in the next iteration of FCS.

That was good to know.

Thank you.

Cheers

Hans