Color Internal Scopes broken in PAL?

Apologies for the repost ... I should have guessed at the time that I wouldn't get much response burying this post in the middle of a really long thread halfway through NAB!

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saul budd on Apr 16, 2008 at 1:44:42 pm

I'm curious ...

A question for everyone who's saying that the Color's internal scopes are bang on, have you tried working on a PAL project?

I am finding that on Color 1.0.2 with a Kona 3, if you have PAL material, your internal scopes do not match what you see on an external scope if you set your output settings in Color to PAL. They do, however, match what you see on the external scope if you set your output settings to NTSC. Unless I am missing something, this behaviour is very wrong.

You don't even need an external scope or an I/O device to see this, export a PAL quicktime of PAL bars in FCP (it will be clearer if you use the Digital ColorBar 100/0/75/0 bars under generators > more bars and signals) and open them in Color in a PAL project, the vectorscope and waveform are not at all what you would expect (and do not match with the ones in FCP), i.e. nothing hits its target in the Vectorscope, and on the WFM, rather than the expected 'staircase' the magenta has a higher luma than the green.

And it is not only the scopes that are affected, it seems that Color is incorrectly converting PAL into RGB right at the start of the process, making the broadcast safe filter practically useless and grades not quite work as they should (not in a way that you'd be likely to notice if you are just curves, wheels, sliders, etc, but in a way that might annoy a die-hard colourist who 'uses the numbers', or anyone who plays around with the Color FX room extensively)

None of this happens if your clips are NTSC, but it does seem to happen to a much lesser degree with HD (haven't tested this one so much).

I was speaking to someone from an external facility we are dealing with yesterday and they mentioned that they had seen this in 1.0.2 but that "this isn't a problem with 1.0.3" ... I can only assume they are on a beta program.

So, am I missing something? I have hunted all over for a setting that I might be missing, and it's possible that I am completely misinterpreting ... but for me the internal scopes are a complete no go.

Uli Plank on Apr 17, 2008 at 6:57:33 am

Which codec are you using?

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

Saul Budd on Apr 17, 2008 at 9:44:45 am

Just checked with the following codecs :

AJA 10bit RGB
AJA 2Vuy
AJA 625 uncompressed
DV PAL
DVCPRO PAL
ProRes 625
Apple Uncompressed PAL 8bit

Didn't have external scopes to hand this time, but experienced the same discontinuity on the WFM between green and magenta on all codecs except for the RGB which looked closer to what you would expect.

Forgot to mention in previous posting that one of the symptoms of this issue (demonstrating that it's not just the scopes which are a problem) is that if you put them side by side you can actually see the difference in colour between the bars in FCP and the bars in Color. You do not see this difference in NTSC, and there does not appear to be the same difference using RGB PAL. Usually I would expect differences in how clips looked between FCP and other apps to be a gamma issue, but I don't know if that can be the case when you experience different results between PAL and NTSC.

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Since this last post I had a look at the RGB codec on an external scope. Strangely, it was then wrong (and out of gamut) on the external scope when the output was set to PAL, and appeared right (or at least, 'less wrong') when the output was set to NTSC. I can only guess that this is because when converting from PAL to RGB and back again, two wrongs do make a right.