Red or blue tinted footage in viewer window

Dumb question #2 for the day, and I've tried searching through the forums for an answer but the search queries return a massive amount of irrelevant results.

Basically, the footage in my viewer window is tinted red, like a red screen is over the image. It disappears when I cut into my timeline, but everything in the viewer looks like it's under a red solid.

Then, to further confuse matters, there is some footage I brought in at a different compression setting, and when I cut that into my sequence, I don't get real-time playback and it's got a blue tint to it, even during playback.

I've even turned to the manual for this, but got hopelessly lost. Any thoughts?

Why the red?
Why the blue?
And is there a switch that I need to turn on to play back multiple resolutions in real time?

Need to look in the FAQ

Why is my canvas red?

Michael Horton
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Brilliant! Thank you.

Is there something in the FAQ that explains why rendered footage turns blue?

What color was it before it turned blue? And what filter(s) you applying?

Michael Horton
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The footage that's turning blue has a different compression setting than the rest of the footage in my timeline. Every shot that I cut in won't play back without rendering - which might be part of the problem because I thought there was some real-time resolution mixing in FCP 6.0.1.

It looks normal in the viewer, normal when paused and unrendered in the timeline window, but after rendering so it can play back, it turns blue.

No filters, no effects, just plain ol' captured footage, and as soon as it renders, it goes blue (much like the viewer window goes red with the RGB+Alpha switch on).

Any ideas? Thanks for the help, this is killing me tonight...

Jeff

How fast a Mac you got? You really need a MacPro to get the open format timeline working well, although I'm a bit puzzled by the blue.

Anyone else?

Michael Horton
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Sorry, posting the system specs rather dumbly slipped my mind.

I'm running:

Mac Pro 2.66 gHz Intel duo-core
OS X 10.4.10
4 gig RAM
QT 7.2
FCP 6.0.1

editing off of a 750 gig external drive through a firewire 400. (Which might explain the unmixed timeline resolutions).

Thanks for your help, Michael... Any thoughts on this blue issue? Ever hear of something like this?

Well the FW drive aint going to cut it with a multi format timeline, but I'm stumped on the blue. Curious, what media have you thrown on the timeline? Don't say something downloaded from the web.

Michael Horton
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Nope, it's not downloaded from the web, but it's almost as bad.

The majority of the footage I'm working with is digitized from a beta with a Blackmagic card, with the Blackmagic 5.7.2 codec. Which, as I figured out, is not compatible with the Blackmagic 6.1 codec and was my problem of the morning.

The new footage - the stuff that is turning blue - is ripped from a DVD using the DVDxDV app that I found somewhere on this site. (Very handy program, by the way.)

So the digitized footage is running at the Blackmagic 8 bit (DVOO) compression.

The captured footage, aka the Blue Harvest, is at DV/DVCPRO-NTSC compression.

The rendering I can live with. And when I crash out tonight, I'll do a media manager on this DVD capture stuff and convert it over the the Blackmagic 8 bit compression to see if that helps... but that's going to take an hour or two to run, and that can happen when I sleep. Maybe I'll even copy the footage to my second internal drive for fun as well.

This blue thing is crazy, though... Got any guesses?

Now let me add a curious wrinkle to this mysterious blue footage... if I put a title slug - even an empty title card over the footage and render it, it comes out normally.

Bizarre.

Try taking a piece of the DV footage (the "blue" batch) and using QuickTime Player, MPEG Streamclip or something else to turn it into another codec, say the Apple Uncompressed 8-bit SD codec. Try putting that into the timeline and see if you have the issue. It's not a solution for all your footage, but it can tell us a few things. Or, use MPEG Streamclip to extract the video-DVD footage again and see if there's a difference.


www.derekmok.com

Derek -

Good ideas. I used media manager to convert my blue-turning footage and re-compressed it with the "blackmagic 8 bit" codec. Problem solved, the footage no longer turns blue when rendered.

Putting the blank title card over the tweaky footage was something I discovered while working last night. It makes me think it might be some kind of bug in the alpha or RGB channels... because putting what is essentially a blank alpha channel over the footage and making FCP re-calculate it solves the problem.

The other thought is that something in the render dinks up the RGB channels, effectively stripping out the red & green channels. The blue tint is close to using a color correct filter and crushing the red and green channels, with a gamma boost thrown in.

I had no idea MPEG Streamclip could extract DVD footage, but that's my Mac newbie status coming through. I might try that tonight just to see the different result.


Jeff