Real-time Color Correction Without Rendering

Folks, I'm scratching my head. I'm finishing a short on 1080p HD Uncompressed in a 23.98 timeline and for the life of me, I can't get the Color-Corrector to act in real-time.

It's not like I'm working on a slow machine either: G5 Quad with 6.5G RAM and a Blackmagic Multibridge Extreme. The disks are in a SATA raid tower and they deliver the footage fine (250MB/s +) until I slap on an effect.

I'm thinking it's the graphics card (my Achilles' heel - a basic Nvidia 6600 with 256MB VRAM) but is it? Shouldn't the Multibridge pick up the slack or something?

I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction.

Thanks,

Sacha Sojic
Montreal, Canada

I'm not sure if it can be done or can't, I've never worked with full uncompressed HD, but I can say it's not the graphics card. FCP doesn't use any processing power from the graphics card. Motion does, FCP doesn't.



travis ballstadt
www.thrillcateditorial.com

G5DP2.5ghz, 4.5gbRAM, 2TB external SATA, Panasonic AJ-D455, G4PB1ghz, 15", 1gbRAM

That's good to hear. And I know that it should work because I've seen it done at a local post house where we finished the last film. They were equipped similarly, albeit with a Kona card instead of the Blackmagic hardware.

Sacha Sojic
Montreal, Canada

Are you trying the "Three Way CC" or the "Color Corrector" Is it in bold when you apply it?

No, the 3-way Color Corrector. None of the effects are in bold...

But here's the deal. My sequence is 10-bit Uncompressed and I just found out that FCP does not do 10-bit in realtime. I created an 8-bit sequence, pasted the contents of my original timeline and bingo. The bold-type effects came back.

So it seems realtime 10-bit color-correction is a feature I'm putting on the next wishlist, even though at that level most people will opt to use dedicated software like Final Touch.

Sacha Sojic
Montreal, Canada

Check out Effects Handling in your Prefs. Maybe if you assign that to the Multi-bridge it'll be RT. I'm just guessing here.

In my book, even if fx are RT, I always render 'em anyway. Makes for a smoother layback.



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