1 December 2009
Colour Management and Video
Posted by admin under: Colour; Video; software .
Today, it occurred to me that I have been dealing with Colour management on the Mac (and PC) for nearly 15 years. A scary thought.
It all came about when a comment I made on the provideocoalition.com site was picked up by the author. The article was excellent and discussed useful tips and tricks for Final Cut Pro.
While the author, Oliver Peters, agreed with some of my points, he disagreed with others relating to colour spaces. Cue a 2hr interuption to my work to create a reply, along with accompanying web page to illustrate colour spaces plus screen grabs showing why it is not a good idea to drag and Adobe RGB image into a Final Cut Pro timeline (it sucks out the colour and density from the image) without first converting to sRGB.
Complex stuff this colour management, and even more so when you start to compare how colour is done ‘right’ in the world of stills photography (an ICC workflow with embedded colour profiles in images) with the workflow used in the Video world (pay enormous amount of money for (IMO) overpriced ‘Reference’ monitors and then calibrate them by eye – at least the ICC system uses an hardware device to calibrate monitors.
The reality is that the world of video is still struggling along without a proper colour management workflow. Stills photography on the other hand, underwent the pain of the conversion to an ICC workflow in the last 10-15 years. The writing is on the wall and with the convergence of stills and video, video is going to have to modernise and adopt that same ICC workflow in the very near future.
While some may question my certainty, the fact is glaringly obvious: Video DSLRs (or VDSLRs) are already tied in to the colour management system and placing an incorrectly profiled file into a video application like Final Cut Pro results in desaturated and and flat looking clips. The RED camera and others like the Viper that also shoot RAW are also tied into colour management.
In many ways the adoption of an ICC colour workflow video will probably do much to reduce the overheads of some of the smaller video houses. Instead of paying for heavily overpriced reference monitors, it should be possible to utilise lower cost displays with hardware calibration devices as used in the stills world. No doubt X-Rite will provide a solution shortly?
Ultimately this should also lead to a world of ‘What You See is What You Get’, so that movies and TV programs alike will display correctly no matter whether the viewing device is a computer, an HD TV or a projector.
As a footnote – Sky are trialling the use of Pantone Hueys to calibrate HDTVs with their customers in Brazil, what X-Rite describe as ‘The World’s largest Video Calibration rollout’
Interesting times.
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Nick is a photographer and writer. He specialises in technical matters relating to photography and has regulalrly provided consultancy services to clients such as Canon Europe, Reuters, Apple and Phase One. Colour management and RAW workflow are particular passions.