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8bit color nonsense
  • 90 Replies sorted by
  • christianhubbardchristianhubbard

    linking is the ONLY way to get from pp to ae

    or, you know, opening a pp project in ae.

    I have dynamic link and never use it because it seems so convoluted and annoying.

  • shianshian

    sorry, that's what I meant. Just open the PP project in AE using "import PP project."

  • MeierhansMeierhans

    Simple CopyPaste works also very well and allows exlude things inside PP.

  • halimecondorhalimecondor

    @shian "Sam's point is valid too. Just make sure if you are going to broadcast that you conform everything back to broadcast standards at the end, or it'll get rejected. But this is broadcast video 101, you guys already know this stuff, right? Cuz you've been dubbing digibeta masters from day one."

    Digibeta? Luxury! How about D2? or say, BetaSP?

    BTW, It used to be called "color correction", I didn't hear the word "grading" until maybe 2006. We used to pay big hourly rates for access to the "CC suite"

    I've also worked transferring some WWII era Kodachrome on a couple projects, remarkable color stability for 70 year old film stock. . .and very limited DR.

    I'm a little curious though, how practical all this grading sweat really is unless you are mastering for Blueray or going to projection. The other end of "broadcast 101" is what happens to your hard work after you hand off the broadcast master to the distributer/broadcaster/time-warner/pbs monster. The squeeze that cable and (yes) sat distribution lays on content is if anything more odious than the ugliest youtube/vimeo compression.

    This is not to say we shouldn't be striving for the best quality, but when time is money anything more than error fixes and few light "color correction" passes in the NLE would have been dubbed "wankage" by my bosses back when I was working on the big stuff.

  • ShaveblogShaveblog

    @halimecondor

    Shhhh, what the hell are you doing, man? Talking about working in the actual film industry has no place here. Can that crap and never speak of it again. These guys are chasing that sweet, sweet dream that an Erector set on their shoulder and hours and hours of grading (i.e. nudging up contrast and saturation on -2/-2/-2/-2 cam footage, or maybe cicking on a Looks preset with their mousing hand while the Cheetos hand wipes off orange on their jeans) will turn "spec rap video I did for a friend okay not a friend but a guy I met through Craigslist" into Oscar gold, or at the very least, a place at the DSLR blogger swag trough.

    So no more about how grading isn't the most goddamn important part of the filmmaker's life, okay?

  • christianhubbardchristianhubbard

    @Shaveblog, I believe you have film industry and broadcast television mixed up..

    I dont think many here have the dream of working in broadcast.

  • shianshian

    @halimecondor - I've been the victim of cable/sat compression before. It's awful. The masters looked wonderful... the broadcast was crap.

  • BuellerBueller

    NTSC: Never The Same Color

  • artiswarartiswar

    Pushing 8 bit all over the place here!

  • soundgh2soundgh2

    @christianhubbard - I have had similar feelings at 1am on a Friday night still stuck in the studio on a TV programme waiting for AAFs as on a film after 3 months of mixing - boring lol

  • StraffiStraffi

    @shian in reference to the workflow you have detailed on the first page, are you loading MTS files directly into PP, or are they being converted to a different file format before you start edit?

    and btw, thank you for all this info. I wouldn't have had a clue about any of this without this forum

  • shianshian

    I'm not using PP but FCP so I have to convert, but if both your NLE and Grading program can both ingest mts, no need to convert. Otherwise, I use 5DtoRGB for FP7 and in FCP-X it does it all for me.

  • richg101richg101

    thanks for this info. I now only use 32bit effects and things like banding have disappeared!

    previously I was using fast colour corrector to take the avchd files back to correct gamma setting, use rgb curves to grade, then bring back contrast using levels. 'levels' used to bring back contrast from a flat profile (being non 32bit) seems to introduce more banding than if I use 32bit effects like secondary rgb curves or ProcAmp to boost contrast.

  • StraffiStraffi

    @shian thanks for your reply.

    Until reading this thread, I had always graded in PP, but now I'm going to have a bash at 32bit colour grading in AE for my latest short. I have read that AE can still be a little buggy with MTS files, so I'll have to see how I got there (Speedgrade also doesn't seem to favour the format).

    As I've not really used the AE before, I'm going to invest in a ColorGHear subscription shortly, so it will be good to see how these principles are applied

  • BurnetRhoadesBurnetRhoades

    A good example of how limited 8-bit color correction and processing is would be go back and observe films involving digital visual effects from before about 1995 or so. Back then high-end workstations would view the resources your phone has as untouchable, government or university-level supercomputing. Visual effects costing millions of dollars operated in 8bit color because there was little choice.

    When it became more standard to be able to process a whole frame at 8bit in less than a minute per, workstations became faster, disc became a bit cheaper and folks finally had access to more than a couple hundred megabytes for less than the cost of a Honda, then 16bit processing became standardized. It was figured out that 12bit linear data could hold the information from a 10bit LOG scan but 16bit processing made the math a little better I suppose. We quickly figured out that even with 16bit processing you could fairly quickly get into visually ugly places with more than moderate manipulation.

    Anyway, going back before these getting-better-but-still-not-transparent days, you can see the posterization and limited DR in scenes of extreme manipulation, and they started out with film, scanned at 10-bit LOG, generally, pulling an "ideal" 8bit LUT version of the image and then eventually going back out to film via laser or high resolution CRT with zero lossy compression added into the mix. Last Action Hero would be a good example. The manipulated scenes literally leap out from the otherwise wonderful Filmed-in-Panavision look of the rest of the movie. They simply couldn't do better back then and that was with workstations costing ~$75,000-250,000 and software in the $25,000-250,000 or more since some of that work was done on Indigos in Wavefront Video Composer and some of it was done with an Onyx and Flame software.

    Nowadays, there is no excuse for any form of manipulation staying in 8bit space.

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