Mr Maze Design

I just finished a rather large video project at iDC Photography which I did animation, video editing, sound, DVD authoring, and technical assistance during shooting. When I got to the final stages of completing the project, some fairly serious color issues started rearing their ugly little troll-like heads.

The center of the problem is this: Our Final Cut Studio 6 workstation is an 8-Core Mac Pro. Our entire studio has monitors which are calibrated to a 2.2 gamma for a variety of reasons (The Mac Pro is running side-by-side 23 inch Cinema Displays). Unfortunately, we don’t have a Kona Card or other proper video output card and a broadcast quality color reference monitor. Which means I was doing Color Grading on a computer monitor… Which means stuff just did not look right on a TV screen when it was output. I struggled trying to find a solution, and finally stumbled across this page on Apple’s website.

So what does all of that mean? Well, it means that like a bunch of other Apple apps (I won’t even get into that right now), Apple thinks that it is smarter than you when it comes to gamma issues. Why? Well, a Mac’s native gamma is 1.8. A Windows computer is 2.2, as well as the entire photo lab industry and a majority of the internet are standarized on the 2.2 gamma. So Apple in its infinite wisdom (sarcasm here) has decided that it will automatically adjust everything for you. But not while you are looking at it, only when you make the finished file. You can imagine the piles of my hair gathering around my workstation as my work looks good in Final Cut but looks like washed-out poo when I open the QT files or burn a disk and play it back on a TV.

So how does that previously mentioned page on Apple’s website help? Well, it spells out the exact amount of gamma adjustment that Final Cut is applying to my files. In fact, it even tells me that I need a gamma adjustment of .818 to make things look correct. Now, this is huge. After I did this, my files looked amazing on a TV and correct in other Apple applications.

How am I applying this? Well, when a segment/chapter/video is finished, I export a QuickTime file from the Final Cut sequence which is self-contained. I then take this finished file into Final Cut, apply the Gamma Effect (Effects>Video Filters>Image Control>Gamma) with an adjustment of .818 to the entire file, and export my finalized QuickTime file which can then be taken into whatever program suits my fancy. In this case, I was using iDVD to author the DVD. Presto, color looks fantastic.

Update:

Well, I wanted to see if this can help fix the color washout that I experience when encoding to h.264. What I found was that a gamma adjustment of 1.4 made this project look good, but fudging the gamma a little bit might be necessary depending on the project.

Tags: Final Cut Pro Gamma, Video Editing

Posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm | Filed under Video, Work.
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