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Quality issues Final Cut lighting

psych1905

psych1905

Hi hopefully some of the experts on here can help. Have just shot some HD footage and brought it into final cut to turn it black and white.
As soon as I do, the lighting itself loses all quality and turns into what I describe as muddy pixelated rings of shading completely ruining the natural effect.
Does anybody have any experience with this at all?

many thanks in advance

edit.
heres an example
20to48w.jpg
 
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cheers for getting back to me, but It's also happening if I change the contrast WITHOUT making it black and white...
I wonder if it's the sequence presets?
I'm using HD 1920 x 1080 24fps
 
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what format is the footage in? If you convert to prores, then use Color to convert the image to B/W... it won't be forced down in the colorspace that FCP uses.
 
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you'll use compressor to convert your footage to prores 422 , then bring it into color to do youre correction... this will help prevent the quantizing effect you're seeing on the walls. Although, you're taking the information and cutting it to the cube root of possible data by doing the conversion, so there may be some banding in places... the trick is to minimize it by selecting a good blend of the RGB channels when doing the conversion (each will look different). You can do this in the FX Room by splitting out the channels, converting them to b/w, then recombining them however suits the look you're going for as b/w images.
 
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cheers for the response. viewing the pro res footage as a mov after conversion looks great. but even in the original colour, as soon as I put it into timeline on the final cut project and render it with no effects added, it loses quality and the light takes on the above muddy quality again...

any ideas? I can only assume that it must be my final cut settings somewhere?

as an update this is what the pro res files look like (on the left)
then exported from final cut with no effects (export as current settings)

2zqebnr.jpg
 
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Final cut dumbs your footage down for display to speed your editing experience... test it by taking the banded footage and doing a full rez output of the clip from FCP to see if the problem is in the footage or just the interface... that's why I'm recommending you do the conversion in Color rather than FCP... it displays the color information differently.
 
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thanks for your help, understand about the 'dumbing down' now...what I've done is exported it in full res and then compressed it externally through the compressor and touch wood, it seems to have done the trick.
cheers!
 
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What are your sequence settings?

Strike that, better question... what version of final cut are you running? I don't know how FCPX works at all and have no experience with it... if the answer is 7 or older, then the previous question stands.
 
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If you're putting the clip into a sequence, rendering out with no changes and 'current settings' and it comes out different then I suspect you have the wrong sequence settings - they should match the format of the source clips exactly.
 
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There is a mismatch between the sequence setting default (first screenshot) and the actual sequence setting being used here (second screen shot)... the sequence is using interlaced 1080i, and I'd venture a guess your prores file is progressive. Try finding the progressive 1080p24 version for the sequence and see if that helps with the problem.
 
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apologies for being slow on the uptake but is this being changed in the second or first menu that I linked?

the second one seems to go to the interlaced HDTV 1080i by default.

what should the compression be on this and also what should the first menu linked setup be? I'm sure this has been wrong for a while as the footage has been playing up for a while.


eDIT.
HDV 1080p24 would this be the one?


cheers again
 
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Lower left there you should be able to go to "load sequence preset..." and the prores preset... otherwise, when you dump the footage into the timeline, then export it converts it to the preset (which is currently not prores, but heavily compressed HDV1080i). I believe this is where the banding is coming from... to test, you could simply make a new sequence in the project and right click to set the properties, then do the load preset to prores 422... which should get you a better output.
 
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ok my settings now look like
1)
2d9bpzs.jpg

2)
3582ypd.jpg


Is the aspect ratio correct still saying 1080pi
now next question do I need to convert the footage to 'pro res' through compressor before I start editing? or can I bring the raw footage straight in from the camera?

cheers!
 
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