FCP 10.4 with new CC tools, 360°, HDR and Canon C200 RAW

[Axel]

This is very exciting! 

The new CC tools are so well thought-out (have so many "hidden" features, like eastereggs, see the Ripple trainings on Youtube) that playing with them is big fun. They are precise and powerful at the same time. You can grade in no time, and you can as quickly make your pathetic 8-bit stuff fall apart completely. Made me wonder if that was actually 32-bit floating point. But I did the same operations in Resolve, and the results are the same. It's just so tempting now to give every single object in your image exactly the hue, saturation and brightness you have in mind! Does anybody know a link to C200 raw footage? Would like to play with that ...

[Bioskop.Inc]

The one thing I have found to be not so great is the LUT uploader - not sure if the LUTs i'm using are just crap or whether its FCPX. But the CC tools are great - too much choice now.

[Axel]

5 hours ago, Bioskop.Inc said:

The one thing I have found to be not so great is the LUT uploader - not sure if the LUTs i'm using are just crap or whether its FCPX. 

If those are „custom camera LUTs“, don‘t use the *effect* „Custom LUT“, but instead go to >inspector >general, load them there permanently and make sure they‘re designed for the color space you‘re using. LUTs for rec_709 look weird in WCG rec_2020.

[JBraddock]

This version seems great but it is definitely slower on my maxed-out iMac on the projects that I am currently working on. Projects that I was able to edit smoothly despite my relatively slow external HDD struggles with the new version.

It seems to me that its due to some bugs being fixed. I know it sounds weird but I used to have problems with audio waveforms where applying compressor or EQ wouldn’t automatically generate new waveforms unless I create a new compound clip. I was able to continue editing and listening to the processed audio but I couldn’t see new waveform instantaneously.

This version has fixed this issue and now the waveform generation is instantaneous but my HDD struggles with the processing. I now have to wait a bit for editing or playback.

So I am not sure how I feel about this  

 

[jonpais]

@Axel or anybody who can help! So I updated to 10.4 and imported my HLG clips and changed the settings to rec.709. In the browser, the clips look all blown out, but if you go to Preferences/Playback and select 'Show HDR as raw values', they look normal in the viewer when you play them. However, when skimming the clips in the timeline, the clips still look blown out. Not sure what I'm doing backwards.  

[mercer]

Did you change them in the inspector or in project settings?

[jonpais]

@mercer I hit Control + Command J and change them in the inspector.

[jonpais]

Here's a screen shot showing what's happening. I can play the blown out looking clips in the browser and they look fine. But when I skim the same clips in the timeline, they still look blown out.

[jonpais]

This, from Apple:

Working with Wide Color Gamut and High Dynamic Range in Final Cut Pro X

When log footage is converted to the working space, Final Cut Pro 10.3
(and earlier versions) applied tone mapping to reduce the dynamic range of the log content to a range suitable for SDR editing. Final Cut Pro 10.4 now supports a wide-gamut (Rec. 2020) HDR working space for which log footage is no longer tone mapped upon conversion. This makes the full dynamic range of the log source footage available to effects in the working space, but it requires the user to reduce the dynamic range of the footage to a specified output range using color-grading controls, custom LUTs, or the HDR Tools effect.

So v.10.4 no longer does tone mapping when converting to rec.709 from rec.2020.

I went ahead and used the HDR Tools effect and this is what I got. Still not usable. Any suggestions?

I think the project's still rec.2020 even though I keep changing it to rec.709....

[mercer]

Does Panasonic have an HLG Rec2020 to Rec709 utility LUT. 

[jonpais]

13 minutes ago, mercer said:

Does Panasonic have an HLG Rec2020 to Rec709 utility LUT. 

I don't know, but I give up already. I'm downloading a copy of the older 10.3.4 with tone mapping. After I blow all my cash on a BMD Decklink, I'll use v.10.4 for HDR.

Edit: BTW, Apple has support for FCP X in China, but not Vietnam!

[mercer]

This may be old news with the new update but I just found a FCPX white paper discussing wide color gamut and from my lazy skimming of the first three pages, I found that you have to make sure both your library properties and your project properties are set for wide color gamut...

[jonpais]

5 minutes ago, mercer said:

This may be old news with the new update but I just found a FCPX white paper discussing wide color gamut and from my lazy skimming of the first three pages, I found that you have to make sure both your library properties and your project properties are set for wide color gamut...

That's for working in HDR, not SDR. Anyhow, my third LaCie Porsche 4TB drive just bit the dust at the warranty expiration date. And while their D2 Thunderbolt 3 drives carry a shit 3-year warranty everywhere else on the planet, I've just been informed that it's been reduced to an even crappier two years in Vietnam. 

[mercer]

With that being said, is HDR ready for prime time? It seems Rec2020 has been around for a lot of years and the joke has been it was named that because it won’t be usable until the year 2020.

Oh, now I’m really lost... I thought HLG was Panasonic’s name for HDR. I am so far removed from shooting or watching any HDR or HLG, that apparently I have a lot to learn. Hope you figure it out, because the new FCPX is awesome.

[jonpais]

12 minutes ago, mercer said:

With that being said, is HDR ready for prime time? It seems Rec2020 has been around for a lot of years and the joke has been it was named that because it won’t be usable until the year 2020.

Oh, now I’m really lost... I thought HLG was Panasonic’s name for HDR. I am so far removed from shooting or watching any HDR or HLG, that apparently I have a lot to learn. Hope you figure it out, because the new FCPX is awesome.

It was named rec.2020 because that is the date they estimated cameras and displays would be able to deliver most of that color space, afaik. 

HLG is HDR, but I grade and deliver it in rec.709. 

[Axel]

@jonpais

Wish I could help. I must admit that I'm still confused about the correlation between the settings (preferences: raw values, library color space, project color space, HDR tools). I have a lot of LOG footage (own slog2, own BM Pocket LOG, FS7 slog3 from my buddy, downloaded Vlog and HLG clips from GH5, some C200 clips had been RAW but sadly converted to ProRes444). Some were radically ETTR'd and surely look overexposed in the browser. However, I can stuff the values between 0 and 100 in the (rec_709) waveform, and nothing looks blown out, and certainly not at 90 somewhat IRE (BTW: you accidentally found the 'custom reference line': when you mouse-over an IRE-value in the waveform and then click, it sticks). You just wrote you give up already, but let me/us try to replicate the issue. I'm quite sure I had recently downloaded the clip in question (or a very similar one), called "Sigma 30mm f3.2". I can't remember where I found this clip, and whether it was V-Log or HLG (browser history deleted through clean install for HS the day 10.4 came out), but it is the most extreme clip on my whole system in that it looked so very much overexposed from the start. That was in 10.3! However, if I use the whole rec_709 pipeline, I am able to make it look normal in 10.4 with highlights hitting 100 (adjust highlights and shadows). alt+cmd+b totally fucks up everything, unuseable. FCP-Internal LUT "Panasonic V-Log" makes it automatically look pretty normal, if somewhat oversaturated to my taste, but with 'legal' values.

You should let us download the clip in your screenshot and guide us through the process. 

29 minutes ago, mercer said:

With that being said, is HDR ready for prime time? It seems Rec2020 has been around for a lot of years and the joke has been it was named that because it won’t be usable until the year 2020.

New territory. Who can appreciate WCG or rec_2020 in 2017/18? Honestly, I don't know. Can't tell for sure if there's a noteworthy visual difference on my own P3 display ...

17 minutes ago, jonpais said:

It was named rec.2020 because that is the date they estimated cameras and displays would be able to deliver most of that color space, afaik. 

HLG is HDR, but I grade and deliver it in rec.709. 

And I'm sure you can do that in 10.4. Let's get to the bottom of this together. My buddy just ordered HDR interface and the Dell HDR monitor. He is on Windows and doesn't have FCP, but I'm curious to see how far he will get with Resolve. If his images will blow my mind, I know I will never ever want to be limited to rec_709 (although my wedding videographer's clientele isn't asking for HDR).

[jonpais]

@Axel Wow, your friend is getting the Dell UP2718Q? 

I just sent you the file.

[jonpais]

Ten days ago over at Creative Cow, Oliver Peters had this to say about the new release:

Some other issues. The same stupid little UI issues that have been there for a while are still there. For example, sometimes you highlight a file name in the browser and the name field becomes blank. Then, if you fiddle with it a bit, the name comes back. This now seems to also affect the scopes, with numbers on the scale sometimes disappearing and then coming back.

I'm playing with HDR a bit. First of all, you won't actually see proper HDR, unless you send HDR video out through a third party IO device to a true HDR broadcast monitor. And NO, the iMac Pro screen is NOT HDR. FCPX effectively goes into a mode where the viewer image is dimmed, as well as the AV output, so that you can do HDR work with non-HDR monitors. Unfortunately this was not carried through to filmstrips and thumbnails. Those appear blown out when working in wide gamut modes.

So when editing HDR, you really do need an HDR monitor, I get that.

But clips in the timeline that've been converted to rec.709 shouldn't appear blown out. So I think that even though I went through the steps several times over, the clips in my project are still rec.2020, not rec.709 for some reason.

With the older version of FCP X I was running before, when I changed the color gamut, the appearance of the affected clips would change dramatically - they all became a washed out greyish-cyan color. Nothing at all happens when I change the color space in 10.4.

The color space option in the pop up menu is dimmed and stuck on rec.709, unlike what I see in Apple's white paper.

Oh, and I get a warning saying I need to edit with an HDR monitor!

[Axel]

@jonpais

I couldn't do the download right away 'cause I'm the family's driver to the Christmas places, now everybody takes a short nap before the next ordeal. You are right: everything looks completely blown out in the timeline, while quite normal in browser. So this is HLG? Because I wonder: with Andrew Reids two HLG clips (horses on a meadow), there is indeed a *very subtle* brightness/gamma change between browser and timeline, and the clips looks much less flat than i.e. the V-log sample. The values are spread (almost) perfectly between 0 and 100. In your clip values that obviously belong between 60 and 100 IRE are *all* flatlined at 110!

However, with one single correction (see attachment) I could normalize these highlights, with the exception of the reflection in your glasses.

How come the differences between your shot and Andrews? It's a riddle to me. You think it's a bug? In a rec_709 project the values should be crushed below 100 automatically? Like I said, I remember having seen the same extreme exposure of one of your clips in 10.3.

 

 

[jonpais]

It's tough being a pioneer! hehe