"Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422
by Simon Chan
on
Jul 2, 2008 at 5:26:57 am
I'm experiencing some bad pixels in Final Cut with 1080p Apple ProRes 422 footage. The source is from AVCHD HPX 3000 P2. The issues are only in Final Cut and Color. When I transfer the footage to After Effects using Automatic Duck the bad pixels don't exist. So the bad pixels are not in the actual source Quicktime clips. And even if I make a Quicktime of the edit out of Final Cut the exported quicktime has bad pixels in it. But not the same bad pixels I'll experience in the sequence in Final Cut. Anyone got any good news for me???
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by josh kanuck on Jul 2, 2008 at 12:13:21 pm
I don't know if this is the ultimate solution, but i have had similar problems with pro rez renders. sometimes if i change the rendering from 10-bit to 8-bit it solves these phantom glitches.
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by Jerry Hofmann on Jul 2, 2008 at 1:08:13 pm
This could be a playback problem caused by a display card issue. Might try reseating that card... if you don't see it externally, nor in AE, it's likely not actually recorded with the artifacts, but is a display card being cranky.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: "Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4" Click here
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17" MBP, Matrox MXO, CD's
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by Simon Chan on Jul 7, 2008 at 8:33:54 pm
P2 Data is gone. The data was copied on location from P2 cards through laptop to hard drives. Then the data was transfered from the hard drive into final cut.
Simon Chan @ Artificial Army
G5 Dual 2GHZ 4.0 Gig Ram, Decklink HD, Atto UL4D, Huge 320R, Final Cut 6.0.2, After Effects CS3
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by Simon Chan on Jul 7, 2008 at 9:07:31 pm
Well the thing is the glitches don't exist on the transfered QT's. They only occur randomly in Final Cut. And actually now in After Effects as well. They don't happen in the same place. If I re-open Final Cut and play the sequence the glitches will be in a different place than the last time I played it. And when i render the glitches happen randomly in places as well.
Simon Chan @ Artificial Army
G5 Dual 2GHZ 4.0 Gig Ram, Decklink HD, Atto UL4D, Huge 320R, Final Cut 6.0.2, After Effects CS3
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by Todd Beabout on Jul 9, 2008 at 9:48:06 pm
We are also experiencing a similar issue here on our systems. Well, one particular workstation really.
These glitches appear completely at random, and not just on the external monitor, but in the Canvas, Viewer, and even in QuickTime when I open the source file.
Blowing the render will sometimes make the glitch go away, but then when we re-render it will show up somewhere else in time, and even another part of the screen. There might be more or less glitches each time we render, it's a crap-shoot.
I'm going to update that workstation's QuickTime version to 7.5 (on 7.4.5 now) at the end of the day today and hopefully that will help, but who knows.
It might be worth mentioning that we are running 4 FCP suites off a Terrablock shared storage. In this guy's room there was a glitch on his screen (canvas). I match-framed it into the Viewer and the glitch was still there. Then I used "Reveal in Finder" and opened the file in QuickTime. Glitch still there. Then came into my edit suite and opened the QuickTime file. No glitch. Hmmm. Went back to his room, and the glitch has disappeared from his FCP project, but was STILL present on the source QuickTime that was open on his box. Shut QuickTime, reopened file and it was gone.
Baffling. Any thoughts?
I'll let everyone know if the QT update helps. We are on FCP 6.0.3 BTW.
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by Simon Chan on Jul 9, 2008 at 9:55:58 pm
We are using latest QT Version 7.5 (149.5)
Final Cut 6.0.4
Your experience is exactly like mine. After Effects isn't as bad as Final Cut. In fact After Effects hasn't had nearly as many glitches and they vanish pretty quick. I think its a bug in the codec using ram...
Simon Chan @ Artificial Army
G5 Dual 2GHZ 4.0 Gig Ram, Decklink HD, Atto UL4D, Huge 320R, Final Cut 6.0.2, After Effects CS3
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by Todd Beabout on Jul 9, 2008 at 10:13:52 pm
Jeremy, our sequence is standard 525 NTSC 29.97. We are using ProRes 422 as both clip and sequence settings, even though I tried changing the sequence settings to 10-bit uncompressed to no avail.
ProRes is something that is newer to us, but we have switched over to doing a lot of projects in that format due to small file sizes, and fairly lossless quality (or so we thought).
I'm going to be trouble-shooting this one for a few days, so I will post back if I come up with something, Simon. I am kinda glad that this problem is happening somewhere else, only because 2+ people troubleshooting is certainly better than just me.
Simon, it also sucks that it appears the QuickTime update won't fix the problem.
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by Todd Beabout on Jul 10, 2008 at 2:10:19 pm
Our footage is SD NTSC 29.97 from BetaSP and/or D-beta source captured through a Kona LHe component (beta) and SDI (d-beta). We also had the exact same problem yesterday with some HDV 1080/60i footage captured through FireWire into it's native codec.
The same clips captured in a different room are OK. This problem is very, very weird.
The only other factor I can think of is that this problem box is running Tiger. We have 2 Tiger boxes and 2 Leopard boxes, but it doesn't really seem like the OS would be affecting clips at random on just one of the Tiger boxes. We are planning an upgrade on these to Leopard soon anyways, so I'll let you guys know if that for some strange reason cures the problem.
Jeremy, I haven't tried the Cinema Tools thing yet but I will try to get in that room and reconform the clips to 29.97. That is if the glitches are there today. So strange...
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by Jeremy Garchow on Jul 9, 2008 at 10:13:44 pm
Alirght guys, do me one favor.
Duplicate one of your clips at the finder level. RIght click on that copy and choose OPen with > Cinema Tools. Depending on the frame rate of the clip, confrom it to it's frame rate. So if the clip is 29.97, confrom to 29.97. If it is 23.98, conform to 23.98. Import that clip into FCP and see if it glitches.
Make sure to Duplicate the clip first. If it works for that one, don't go doing a bunch as there's one thing to check and that's timecode.
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by Simon Chan on Jul 16, 2008 at 7:28:50 pm
Only solution we came up with was to render it all out Uncompressed 10bit then go into the source QTs and export Tiff frames out where the bad pixels were and replace those frames in Final Cut. Then export another Uncompressed 10bit QT out for our master...
Simon Chan @ Artificial Army
G5 Dual 2GHZ 4.0 Gig Ram, Decklink HD, Atto UL4D, Huge 320R, Final Cut 6.0.2, After Effects CS3
Re: "Bad Pixels" Apple ProRes 422 by Todd Beabout on Jul 24, 2008 at 5:03:04 pm
Hey Simon,
I just wanted to follow up with you because we finally resolved the problem.
We had a corrupt volume that this edit suite was writing to on our Terrablock. We gave that user access to a different partition and the problem went away.
I noticed that you were using a Huge array, but you might try either repairing permissions on that partition, or when time allows, you might want to consider reformatting the partition that you are working on.
I only mention this because the screenshots that you posted are look exactly like what we experienced.
BTW, nice work you do over there. Cool website too.
