Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Operator error.

Looking through some of my 7D footage, I started to notice missing detail in the shadows in Final Cut Pro (my editing software of choice). However, Apple's Color software seemed to have no problem with that detail. Here are a couple of examples, with the black levels boosted to make the point more obvious.

Final Cut Pro...


Color...



Yeah, it's subtle. (Depending on your computer and monitor, it might be imperceptible.) But I shot several Monster Hunt bits in very low light, knowing I'd have to push the footage in post. So I need all the shadow detail I can get.

I did some research and finally found some info regarding my issue at DVInfo.net. David Newman explains...

"Canon selected to place black and white [at] YUV Luma level 0 and 255, rather than the far more common 16 and 235. Many NLEs handle the extended range poorly and clip off the supers, so much so, originally the Canon cameras where thought to be very contrasty (there were many reports of this.) Later there was a patch to Quicktime that addressed this..."

(You can read the whole thread here.)

A patch to QuickTime, huh? Yeah, I guess I haven't ran any software updates since... aw, heck, since I don't know when.

Short story long, I updated QuickTime, the "Pro" apps (including Final Cut), and anything else that looked like it might affect video playback on the MacBook Pro. And now my 7D footage has a lot more latitude than it did yesterday.

3 comments:

Andrew Bellware said...

Don't I know it brother! I just wish that all TV's, computers, and cameras, did the same thing.

Of course, sometimes when I'm mixing I want there to only be one brand of speaker. And I want it to be in mono...

Andrew Bellware said...

When I say "did the same thing" I mean that they would portray color and brightness the same way -- not that they would mess up and arbitrarily change what they do until you get an update that understand them...

Chance Shirley said...

Agreed on "same thing."

And life would be so much simpler if we'd just left well enough alone and stuck with mono.