christangey
 Second Officer
Australia
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OK DJI User you asked about workflow in FCPX.
You may regret that as this will be LONNNNG! :-) Firstly I can't emphasise enough how important it is to get your exposure right with the drone camera FIRST when working with HLG. If you have a choice between over-exposing and under-exposing always go slightly under, because you will get ZERO detail back in HLG if you go over.
In terms of FCPX workflow, the first thing I've learned is forget about Rec2020 until you need it one day! Also If you are not a Mac person some of the below may seem like gobbledegook.
Basically, as I also store 4K stock footage to license, my first thing is to eliminate wild footage I don't need. I am getting very disciplined at storing only what I need to. For this I open all HLG files straight off the micros SD then open each one up in Mac Preview. Using the "trim" feature I cut them down then save again under a different name. Of course some clips may have more than one usable move or shot you want to extract, and trim can only be done from either end of the clip. In that case I just reopen the master file off the SD, trim and then save those under different file names too.
As I said I have given up trying to edit in FCPX projects set as Rec2020 in both library and project, as I can get them looking reasonably good on the timeline but then when I export a clip they look nothing like what you've worked on, with huge blowouts in chroma and luma. Life's too short to worry about that and in the end I don't need to work in that color space for now. The main thing is that I still have the master files in HLG so if BBC, NHK or somebody wants to license a shot I just handball it to them and their specialists know exactly what to do. In the meantime I'm happy grading in REC709 as in the above video, as HLG is a bit of a hybrid format that works in both. Also if I ever need to truly edit for HDR in future, I still have the masters anyway.
When shooting always use NDs and zebra (pity the M2P doesn't have adjustable settings for zebra) If you get stripes, it's gone, bye bye, no detail, unrecoverable. That can be a little annoying when you are flying into a sunset and want to bring back the ball-shape of the sun or something, ...not going to happen.
While it's important not to overexpose it is also important not to shoot too dark either as it drags the blacks up and you can get both a mauve/purple thing going on in shadows and/or noise, the latter is usually cleaned up really well in plugins like neat video.
I can only talk with my experience in FCPX in terms of grading. When you first place it on the Rec 709 timeline your heart will skip a beat as chances are the shot will look really overexposed. Don't panic, it's just some weird Final Cut thing. First thing you do is pull down highlights to make it look normal, I have found a really good guide for those of us who have blue skies every day (!) is that if it is overexposed there will be a cyan-colored banding in the sky, pull highlights down until it looks normal blue. then I would try tweaking your blacks down, and only then play with mid-tones. As you can see from my video you shouldn't have to do a lot with saturation. Then to keep it in a 10 bit color space export it as Prores 422 or 422 HQ.
To get it online as an mp4 I use a great little encoder called "Handbrake" which is way quicker than the FCPX native one. I export at 40,000kbps in H265 which is now accepted by Youtube and Vimeo, this is critical to keeping your 10 bit color space right through to the viewer. Basically the difference between delivering in 8 bit and 10 bit is one is a million colors the other is a billion, go with the billion!
I hope that helps a bit. |
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