Colorista Clips No More
Friday, January 25, 2008 at 7:00PM A while back I posted a workaround for maintaining all the IRE values, even those above 100%, when using Colorista in Final Cut Pro. With Final Cut 6.0.2, this workaround is no longer needed (yay!), but you'd never know until someone told you. Allow me to explain.
Here's a shot in Final Cut 6.0.2. Note that the windows are above 100 IRE (click to enlarge).
If you apply Colorista, you'll see the values get clipped to 100%. This is not cool.
To fix this, you first need to select Sequence > Settings and set the sequence to always render in high-precision YUV:
When you go back to the timeline you'll see that the highlights are still clipped. But the key is in the wording—always render in high-precision YUV. So go ahead and hit Cmd + R to render the shot:
Your highlights are back! Final Cut is always using a lower-quality render setting as a placeholder until you actually render the shot. When you do, both Final Cut and Colorista do their thing in full floating-point color.
If you make a change to Colorista's settings, you'll get your red line back and your apparent clipping:
...but as soon as you render you'll get all your highlights back:
Enjoy!
Reader Comments (8)
This is great!
Any idea how much longer the render times seem to be because of the floating point processing?
Thanks for the info!
Colorista is always float and is always rendered using your GPU, so no timeline settings affect its render times. But other FCP rendering stuff might get slower in float—I don't know.
Well, is it really cool? Because I always color correct, then render. I adjust my settings, and if those settings are clipped, how can I tell what I really have? I render and boom, they are back above 100IRE, and I need to adjust again. But while it is clipped, I cannot judge where my levels really are. So it is a partial solution.
Now, if I can only get it to not crash FCP 6.0.2...running on 10.4.11.
Fair enough Shane, it's definitely not ideal. As you can tell, we're kinda at Apple's mercy here though.
Yeah, I figured.
Can the new FCP render at 16bpc or 32bpc ?
According to Rebels Guide, shouldnt we "never" render on an NLE timeline?
I find Colorista much easier than Color anyways.
Interesting, did the high precision YUV rendering option in FCP version 5 behave incorrectly?
I agree with Shane. It's still a bit tough to work with. I do like how it works, better than the FCP CC, but this one glitch keeps me from using it a lot of the time.