D7000 around Brazilian rivers and lakes

Hi,

After some trouble editing with FCP X here is a video shoot with the D7000+Aquatica+Tokina 10-17

http://vimeo.com/29336607

Marcelo Krause

www.marcelokrause.com

Quite nice, beautiful colors. It looks as if you deliberately crushed the blacks on the waveform. Impressive

Steve

Excellent portrayal of a beautiful evironment.

Thanks...I am new to video. I did a few quick edits with iMovie and upgraded to FCP X when it was released. I used the program for the first time last week. I followed a friend's advice to set the D7000 to low contrast/low saturation in order to capture the best dynamic range. It turns out that all my footage looks washed out (as expected...). When I imported then into FCP X they became vibrant and with contrast (as seen at the little FCPX preview window...). So I thought that FCP X should be doing some black magic mambo jambo and tried to fix all the color and contrast automatically. I did all the editing and when I exported the movie...surprise, surprise, the colors were all washed out again. I called my friend and he said that the little window in FCP should not be used as a color reference and that I should have and external video monitor to review the results.

I skipped the external monitor option and spend a few mornings tweaking the adjustments on FCP X to match the exported movie "look " to the one I was seeing on the preview window. So here are my color correction settings:

Saturation overall +30%, shadow exposure -10%, highlight exposure +5% and on top of that I have set gamma on compressor to 1.5

But remember that I started from a very low contrast/ low saturation clip.

I had another problem. I added a soundtrack from iTunes. The song when played in iTunes was fine. When I played it in the FCP timeline it was fine. BUT when I exported the movie there was an annoying tic tic tic tic during the whole song. I spent hours trying to fix the problem, changed songs and etc...Finally called my friend again. He said that only AIFF and WAV files worked on FCP. I said "you are wrong, I imported a mp3 file and it accepted ". He advised me to convert the file to AIFF in QuickTime Pro and add the converted file to the soundtrack. And the tic tic tic was indeed gone.

Marcelo

Marcelo,

Your friend is correct. Use only AIFF files in FCP even if you have to convert another format to it. Unfortunately, unlike Final Cut Studio3, Final Cut X doesn't allow for external monitoring for color correction purposes and this, hopefully, will be one of the first fixes to come as it is very necessary. You cannot do proper color correction on a computer's screen. Using X's waveform and vectorscope can help a great deal but an external monitor is mandatory for proper CC.

You got off to a great start with your video.

Steve