[Rafael Amador] "I think that the chance of rendering in both color spaces that would have been a real plus for FCPX. Although just 8b in RGB, FC have it."
I guess my point is that with floating point RGB processing, it doesn't matter how you render at all; where necessary, the RGB/YUV transforms are built into the effects. The editor doesn't have to worry about encoding or precision. If you want to make a luma adjustment in an effect, you can. It doesn't matter to you if the computer stores the images in RGB and translates them back and forth to YUV for processing, because it's all lossless.
I know that you know what you're doing, so you're able to understand why you might want to render in YUV or RGB with FCP7 and are able to choose accordingly. Not everyone was.
I think this was one of the good simplifications that FCPX made over FCP8. A dual-system rendering engine requires dual-system effects, many of which will just do a YUV/RGB transform themselves and then follow a single processing path. FCP was a mess, offering some YUV effects and some RGB effects. Because the RGB processing was 8-bit, it was easy to get clipping or rounding errors if you didn't know the mechanics behind what you were doing.
Doing all processing in floating point RGB makes it simpler for users, simpler for developers, and doesn't affect the image at all.
There's a lot I'm not fond of in FCPX, but I think this engineering decision was sound.
[Walter Soyka] "FCPX is not alone in processing in RGB, either: it joins apps like After Effects, Color, Flame, Fusion, Nuke, Resolve, SCRATCH, Shake, and Smoke."
[Rafael Amador] "Being no one of them NLEs."
Well, Smoke is an NLE (among other things), but this raises an interesting question: where does a modern NLE end, and a coloring, compositing, or effects app begin? FCPX does all of these things, too.
I think that its new imaging engine is probably the single most important improvement over FCP7. But then again, I'm biased. I do graphics work, so I'm more into the grading/compositing/effects/finishing side and less into the editorial than a lot of folks here.
Walter Soyka
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