Blackmagic Forum

I've been noticing that, when shooting in prores video mode, the colours coming out of the camera are often quite off. Everything red was coming up orange, and skin tone was pretty ashen.

It was weird to think that this camera that I'd waited so long for was somehow fundamentally broken, yet when I got to editing it, things got even weirder. When opening the files in final cut, everything was somehow fixed. All the colours were suddenly exactly as they should be.

I've attached a screenshot of what I mean. There's a shot of a camera chart, and a still from the convention I was shooting. The top versions are from final cut, and the bottom versions are from quicktime, which is also how the camera display was seeing things.



But even then, the colours weren't quite perfect. Here's another image to show what I mean. This is a picture of a red wall. From left to right, we see how quicktime, final cut, and my iPhone 5 all display the colour of the wall. The iphone manages to get the closest to how the wall actually looked.



Now I realise that the intended use of this camera is to shoot in log and grade it, And the film mode is having none of these issues. But for those specific shoots where your editor hates grading, It's nice that the video mode is there, but this could be a serious issue with that.
As I'm not so clued up on the technical side of editing, my main question is simply; 'what the crap is going on here?'.

I just took the first image into photoshop and using the levels tool, I matched the white balance from both images and they look almost identical - one does appear to be clipping in the colour channel a bit more...

It could just be the working colour space of each bit of software. Not sure if it would help for sure, but maybe compare the two on a waveform to see if they are truly different on a fundamental level.

They're literally the same image, and no grading has been applied at all. I'm just a little confused as to why the different programs are giving me completely different readouts of what the colours are, and why they are that wrong in the first place.

Nick Smith wrote:They're literally the same image, and no grading has been applied at all. I'm just a little confused as to why the different programs are giving me completely different readouts of what the colours are, and why they are that wrong in the first place.

Different bits of software have different colour spaces and gamma settings. Sometimes BIG differences.

I see. That's quite a worrying amount of difference. Is there any chance that Black Magic would ever fix the way its being displayed on the screen? That's just as bad as the quicktime examples.

Nick Smith wrote:I see. That's quite a worrying amount of difference. Is there any chance that Black Magic would ever fix the way its being displayed on the screen? That's just as bad as the quicktime examples.

Fix what? You are seeing the different ways that players, devices or software display colours that's all, nothing to do with the camera

Nick Smith wrote:I see. That's quite a worrying amount of difference. Is there any chance that Black Magic would ever fix the way its being displayed on the screen? That's just as bad as the quicktime examples.

I agree with you Nick, the color of the camera display needs to be fixed. My Canon 60D has far better color on it's flip out screen. I was bummed out too. Thank God the colors all look fine once in a proper editing program.

Sorry to bring this up again but noticed this especially today.

Record settings: Prores - Film

Display Settings: Video

Red looks orange.

Display setting: Film

Still the same variance just more washed out.

How the hell are we going to get the WB right in prores?

Of course RAW can be adjusted but the display is definitely misrepresenting colours.

I think this camera needs to be able to record a custom WB on location so at least we know the WB will be what we are after. Any thoughts?

Please correct me if I'm wrong or how are you guys getting around this?

is no one familiar with color spaces and gamuts? I get color discrepancies coming from Illustrator to After Effects, and with what the monitor reads.

we do agree that the camera need alot to be perfect unless if you want to buy an expensive one , yes it do have problem with red color and missing alot of options , need to be solved as soon as possible