Apple Color & OSX 10.7 Lion compatibility

It works for me at home. That said, I don't have any video I/O there so others might want to shed light on this subject.

What I can say - not sure this is a Color or Lion issue - is that screen renders look very different in Color vs other apps. Other apps also differ from each other more than I experience at the studios 10.6 machine.

I have Color running on Lion (latest version), using a Matrox I/O box with no issues. Make sure you update your I/O box firmware when you update your OS.

[Erik Lindahl] "I don't have any video I/O there so others might want to shed light on this subject.

What I can say - not sure this is a Color or Lion issue - is that screen renders look very different in Color vs other apps. "

Ah, where to begin? Apple never really "got it" when they offered "Final Touch" as a constituent application in the Final Cut Studio. And this subjective complaint, that things "look different", is in the top three Things Complained About ever since. But (Final Solution) they have EOL'd it, and I gather have cannibalized "COLOR" as it became known, for parts as it were, and now there is a sort of enhanced 3-way in Final Cut X. With "auto-match". What a Brave New World.

Now apparently under FCX/Lion, they have supposedly unified ColorSync governance of the graphic display characteristics that exist between broadcast and graphics, which was also supposed to have been addressed in Snow Leopard. Whatever. Doesn't matter anymore. Judging by this forum going off a cliff, COLOR won't even be discussed 6 months from now.

It is not enough to say that renders "look different". Without actually measuring image values, a non-broadcast user is unlikely to be able to appreciate that COLOR was designed for and operates in Rec709 at an assumed display gamma of 2.2. Apple's default output for its suite of consumer applications is predicated on the print-ready (for photography and desktop publishing) display characteristic of 1.8. Corollary note: this is why the "Spyder" calibration toys are not suitable for use with COLOR, or anything else remotely associated with broadcast requirements.

Other differences can creep in. Apple's other ill-advised ProRes4:4:4:4 codec, while admirable as a stab at a codec that can carry an alpha channel, suffers from, among other things, an ambiguity that allows it to be, without much external warning, either RGB or Y'CbCr. Over and over and over again, now I am seeing scaling problems and channel-mapping errors between all the editing, grading, compositing, etc., applications that make assumptions about how the source media has or has not been encoded. What is hilarious is the notion that it is somehow "better", (probably because it is "bigger") when 99% of those users who have this delusion are H264 generators --- but the practical upshot is that they are using a boxcar to carry around a potato chip ('crisp' for English-speakers.)

Had a short chat yesterday with an individual who espoused the attitude that we really need a governing body like SMPTE to step in and re-establish some order in this "democratized" chaos. Fat Chance. Not when so few are even able to scope read.

jPo

You mean "Old Ben"? Ben Kenobi?