Hi there fellow Colorists!

I’m new on the forum and kinda new to grading, but not colour-correction as such. I work as a retoucher and my main subject is light and colour so I’m used to that, and know the difficulty of transfering the right color to different colourspaces and so forth.

Here’s the problem. I’m working on a private project filming a clock-commercial and run into some roadbumps along the road. In Color (Apple Color) everything looks sexy, in FCP it looks okey but when i output the file, H.264, 5000kbps, 720p. I’ve been filming with a Canon 5D Mk II and converted the photage with MPEG Streamclip to Apple Prores 442HQ, native size.

Here’s some printescreens from different programs.

The Original from Color:

Editing in FCP:

The outputed file in VLC:

Quicktime:

In Color the film is crispy, nice contrast and a little subtle touch of yellorange in the highlights. QT kills the look by making it all neutral and VLC tends to put some greenish look to it.

I would like to get the same feeling from color to the final product.
Anyone? Help :)

Thanks in advance!
/Christian

Hi, Christian.
How are you monitoring the image in Color?

Via a calibrated Eizo CG222W. I know it’s not a broadcast-monitor but it should show somewhat correct color?

Dude, you got the same problem as everybody gets, but unlike other you see the problem.
1. The problem is a gamma conversion from 1.8 to 2.2 – the first thing you should know (use gamma correction filter on output from fcp with value 0.88)
2. Every single codec works his with own color space and every next time you convert video, for an example, i used DivX Converter and i got deep shadows and high contrast with high saturation.

how to decide a problem.
firstly, when you exporting from fcp, export Prores with “Automatic gamma correction – None” in codec settings. So FinalCut would not correct the gamma of project to 2.2 when exporting. Then you will not get trible gamma correction, 1st when exporting from color to fcp (you going from 1.8 of color to working 2.2 of FCP), 2nd when exporting from FCP to prores with gammacorrection from 2.2 to 2.2, so you going 4.84 gamma and 3rd time you getting camma loss its when you converting to DivX, you going from 4.84 to 10.64 of gamma amount.

in different situations, the count of gamma changes may be different, some people can get 1st and 3rd and some people 2nd and 3rd…

but anyway, look for gamma losless