Hello all,

Should be a point many times discussed, but not solved : YUV to RGB conversions done in AE8.

I am videographist, I work on Mac, and I'm something like 20 years experience. I tell you this to avoid usual recommandations and useless pre-checkups...

I was recently on 10.4 OS with a quad G5, and I just switched to MacPro 8 core, running 10.5 OS.
My video board is a Kona3, that's now exclusively with Pal HD IO (1920*1080 YUV 10 bit).

As 10bit uncompressed is just a pain in the ***, I decided to use 10bit HQ ProRes, which works like a charm, at least until I have to go out and come back to FCP...

From what I saw, uncompressed 10bit YUV is correctly interpreted as a footage in AE8. There's a slight gamma shift when previewing AE comp thru Kona3 preview, but once back in FCP, gamma shift is just gone.
BUT ProRes is totally misinterpreted, and huge color shifts are occuring, with no easy or correct way to fix it. If some of you wanna make a short test, I can recommand exporting FCP bars, as ProRes QT, and import into AE. Look at what you now have : total crap.

I've been playing with color management, Rec709 simulation on/off, footage interpretation as Rec709 on/off, only slight differences occur, and for sure nothing related to signal shifts I can see...

So what the f**k ?

Is it a known problem at Adobe ? As many post companies are actually switching to HD, buying new computers, new video boards, looking for new consistent HD workflows, is Adobe aware of the trouble this issue can cause ?

That said, is there a way to fix this by hand ?
I know there's a famous "interpretation rules 802" text file, supposed to contain rules to interpret many formats, but I can't figure out what to do in it...

Anyone with such knowledge around here ?

Am I alone with this issue ?

Thanx for your help

David

Have you tried using the Legacy Quicktime gamma checkbox in your AE color management?

Have yout tried the Levels Animation Preset - Computer->RGB (I think its under Img Utils)

My understanding is that the gamma issues that occur when using Quicktime codecs like ProRes are a fault of Quicktime, not After Effects.

I use 10 bit uncompressed QT files regardless of Standard or High Def, and have no gamma conversion issues. Why do you consider 10 bit uncompressed files to be "a pain in the ***"?

Hey Andrew,

The gamma issue is for sure a misunderstanding problem between apple & adobe.
Does Prores can be seen as faulty when it works like a charm inside fcp or any of the fcp suite software ? I'm not that sure...it may yes, but I just don't know.
Also, Quicktime, even being sometimes dirty, dictates the way to go. It's not an opinion, it's a fact. My workflow is entirely dependent of QT, and AE is a great software but still supposed to handle QT seamlessly, what he doesn't actually...

But my question was more "how to fix it" than "who's guilty"...

10bit uncompressed is just too fast & too big for me.
I have 2x 500Go Huge systems, but disks are not very stable at that datarate, and files are just huge..

Maybe bigger & faster drives would be a solution

Hi David,

Although I am not using the prores codec, I use colour management all the time to correct YUV to RGB levels.

I notice you said you were interpreting footage as HDTV (Rec. 709). I think that may be your problem.

I set the project working colour space to be HDTV (Rec.709) but I interpret the footage as SDTV PAL 16-235 or HDTV (Rec. 709) 16-235. The 16-235 part corrects the luminance level issues and my final output is always correct for Final Cut and also Avid.

Hope this is helpful

Nic

FWIW: I am having same issue in Premiere (Adobe Media Encoder) where I export to Apple QT YUV422 24 bit that is then loaded into FCP and Mastered for broadcast via Kona Card.

Images being broadcast are "blown-out".

Looking for a solution and suspect I have to find a Levels Control 16-235.