I have a RED 2k sequence from FCP. Looks fine and grades well in Color. I render out to ProRes4444, and all the footage looks slightly soft and fuzzy after sending it back to FCP. FCP RT playback settings are set at high.

What gives?

Is the zoom setting in the canvas window set to 100%?

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Yes, of course. I'm also monitoring out via Blackmagic card. In the past, no problems whatsoever. I re-opened a past project today with the identical workflow to see if generally something is screwy with my system. Not the case. My ProRes4444 renders are as pristine sharp as they should be.

The issue is not with FinalCut. If I go to the rendererd grades (g_1, g_2, etc.), and open them with QT Player, I see the same issue. Everything has gone slightly soft during the render, and I don't know why. During grade I did not apply any grain-reduction, no soft vignettes, no reason why I should be losing sharpness.

In Color the project looks like it should. It's upon render to ProRes4444 that I lose considerable sharpness...

Very tight deadline to meet. Dead in the water at the moment..

Damned. I missed this one. Have you checked that your render/grading proxy is set to full in the User prefs in Color?



www.strypesinpost.com

Yes, of course, render/grading proxy settings are at full. Although I thought that this only effected viewing in Color, no effect on the export codec which is set to ProRes4444.

I can get a sharp image if I add a slight touch of post sharpening back in FCP. Not the ideal way to go.

They did the edit with 2k proxies. I couldn't get the proxies to relink properly in Color (freeze frames, looping bug) and had to relink about half the shots by hand (about 500 out of a total approx. 1,100). Many of the clips were spanned, so tried using ColorFixer, but that just made things much worse.

Last time we do it this way. Next time, we either media-manage it down and create an new set of ProRes4444 mediafiles and relink to those, or use a RED Rocket.