Vegas Uncompressed HD .mov > Compressor > ProRes > HDCam transfer

[Baldwin Li]

Hi folks,

I am outputting a short film cut in Vegas 9.0e for HDCam transfer - trouble is the suite I'm going to is FCP so they requested a ProRes file obviously only something I can render using FCP. So, my solution was to render uncompressed HD 1920 x 1080 25fps progressive to go onto a Mac and then render to ProRes.

Since it's going to HDCam then I expected it would need broadcast colour level range 16-235 so I exported from Vegas with this range. I then used Compressor on the Mac to render the ProRes file. When importing the file into FCP the blacks are sat up on the scopes (what you'd expect if the scopes were set to full range 0-255) but then I read somewhere that Compressor expects 0-255 and will then change the levels to 16-235 when encoding(?) I rarely use FCP so I couldn't find where to check whether the scopes levels were expecting 16-235 or 0-255 levels.

Ok, after a bit more googling it sounds like that FCP always expects 0-255 is that right? Is there a quick way to remap the level shift (Studio RGB to Computer RGB Levels filter Vegas) or tell FCP to expect 16-235 from the source material? Or, am I just best advised to re-render the whole film again in 0-255 then get it rendered out in Compressor again(!)

Thanks in advance,

Baldwin