A colorist was looking at our Premiere Pro-rendered ProRes edit in Flame when he noticed the copy was not full-resolution. "No problem!" I said, "I'll just render out a full resolution copy right now. I transferred my Premiere Pro project to FCP by hand and brought it with me." But lo and behold, after export, this copy was different! Its gamma had changed, and thrown off all the coloring as a result. As I had not a copy of Premiere pro, I couldn't render out another copy the same way as the first, and the colorist had to redo everything.

Why is this happening? I notice gamma changes in other places too, for instance when I take a ProRes file into After Effects, then render out to ProRes, I get a brighter gamma shift of about 0.2.

What's going on here, and why is it so difficult to keep gamma consistent?

There has been a gamma shift bug with Quicktime, but I'm not too familiar with it as I don't use FCP and avoid Quicktime like the plague. Others may have the details.

Andrew

I have noticed this as well - if there is documentation on this as to why it happens, I would be glad to read it...