Crush problem solved - QT 7.6
 

From Stu:

ProLost: Quicktime 7.6 Fixes 5D Movies

Spread the word: it works! This is a big deal.

Fixes the clipping also. No more need for cumbersome work-arounds.

Yay!

Great news, I can't wait to test this one

Dan

funny, I saw the quicktime update come in today, but delayed installing it due to a massive archiving/copying job I'm enduring... now can't wait for the last 500GB to copy!

Now we just need a easily accessible transcoding app

Yea!

On Tuesday I did a presentation on the 5D Mark II to the local Final Cut Pro group. I shot this footage live in front of the audience and transcoded the "before" clip using QuickTime 7.5.5 in Compressor, it's the one on the right. I upgraded to 7.6 and recompressed today using the same Apple ProRes setting. You can see the "after" on the left. Look at the difference in shadow detail.

Does this help if you use Vegas to edit?

It looks much better than before, on Vegas anyways. Histogram does show gaps though, worries me?! ...Performance still slow.

There's no question that it's completely fixed on my system. It's a "whole" image for the first time - like a new camera. Thanks for a quick response Apple. Now I'm really psyched.

strange, just ran the update and seeing no change here...

But is it stable?
 

I can handle slow, but is it stable? I was never able to get in more then a dozen or so clips before it crashes.

Am I the only one with this problem? I would love to use proxies, but I can never revert back to the originals without crashing.

you're not the only one - I reported the same problem in the original thread I started yesterday. The very first project (Vegas) I tried re-rendering had 30 clips, so when I switched out the proxy files, it simply crashed. I was hoping it might be something limited to my system configuration :(. Oh well, maybe 7.6.1 will come out in 6 months and it will fix it.

The new Quicktime solution is good for a quick fix. It works in Vegas. (I don't know about other NLEs. Sorry.) However, be aware of the following:
* The new Quicktime decoder captures the blacks and whites (yay!), but slightly increases the gamma. Your mid tones will be brighter, and there will be some black stretch.
* The adjustments are done with an 8-bit output. The result is gaps and peaks in the histogram. This could lead to slightly more contouring and quantization error.

Fortunately,
* You can still do the re-wrap trick in Vegas. You still need to do the re-size and re-center thing.
* The re-wrap levels are the same as before - perfect. There are no gaps all the way from 0 to 255.

The Bottom Line:
* Upgrade!
* Feel free to use the MOV file for quick work, especially if you don't plan to color correct.
* Maybe the brighter gamma levels look good, maybe not. It's a judgment call.
* Rewrap to MP4 if you want the best possible quality, don't want the boosted mid-tones, or if you plan to color correct. For color grading, you want all the levels you can get.

I would prefer if the decoded output was more faithful to the camera output, but I'm not complaining. The new decoder gives us a solution for fast turnaround, without the black crush. And we can still re-wrap for best quality.

@Jon,

I can confirm that I'm getting the same results (gamma, mid-tones etc.) as you have, with both Premiere CS3 and Vegas 8.0c. I used the scopes to compare the 5D MKII 2 MOV file to a Cineform AVI file that was converted from the original MOV file.

If you do the rewrap, I made some scripts to make life easier for the re-size and re-center. Check out my post at http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/998409-post21.html

I have yet to thank you for that. So, thank you! <SMILE>

Quicktime 7.6 on the mac opens the h.264 files with the discussed over bright gamma when the 'Final Cut Studio color compatibility' preference is checked.

The info text below displays ' When enabled, video is not displayed using ColorSync. Source colors are read with 2.2 gamma and are displayed in a color space with 1.8 gamma.

After the QT 7.6 update Mpeg Stream Clip now displays a great image and renders out to Pro Res without the need to go into Apple Color.

Can you guys tell me if this is what I should be doing on a PC with either Premiere or
Vegas....

Open Quicktime, open 5DMKII movie, export movie using same settings as the original movie, then open either Premiere or Vegas and edit the output movie from quicktime as usual??

Does this sound right, or am I missing something

For Vegas, I recommend using the latest version of Quicktime. For quick edits, you can just put the clips on the timeline and edit. The blacks won't be crushed, but for some reason, the mid-tones are artificially lifted.

For the cleanest results, you can still re-wrap. Details are here:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/canon-eos...rap-vegas.html

Neither solution deals with the hungry nature of this codec. It won't play in real time on most Vegas systems. That's another topic though...

After I ran the update I'm still having the same issues in fcp & quicktime player, but things look fine in MPEG Streamclip...

I've been intrigued by this update and i've been looking more closely at some stuff and without getting into it too much I think some problems remain.

essentially what seems to be happening is that quicktime is performing a conversion from YUV to studio RGB (at least it's scaling it properly without clipping the "superwhite" and "superblacks'), but then it stretches the range back out to cRGB and that's the output. This reduces the detail - you can see there are 36 gaps in the histogram for the RGB channels.

Ideally given our 8-bit RGB colorspace limitations, Quicktime would convert from YUV straight to cRGB, scaling the levels properly, leaving us with all of the details and full 8-bit (256 levels) resolution. I still see this as an improvement over what we had, which seemed to be YUV->sRGB (without properly scaling the out of bounds levels) and then passing clipped 220-levels cRGB.