The Top Ten Percent Rule / 16-235 RGB

Rebels Guide - Page 236 (small print at bottom)

"In truth, the clipping is mandated by the codec and it's treatment of luminance values, not by After Effects. You can blame Apple for this problem in Final Cut Pro and Adobe for this problem in Premiere. Or, if you use a video card or codec that maps video to 16-235 RGB, then you can ignore this whole scetion and head straight to the sdiebar."

In college I have to use Avid Media Composer 4 for the Edit.

It's running on a HP Workstation with a Quadro FX560 video card.

We are shooting in DVCAM and digitizing as an OMF media and I have the choice of DV 25 411, DV 25 420 / DV 50 or 1:1 OMF

Do any of these allow me to "ignore this whole section and head straight to the sidebar"?

Cheers

Adam

Ok, I've looked into this a little more and it appears DV25 420 is the correct type to use in PAL land.

I can now create my edit in avid and export it as AAF file with links to the OMF media.

This I can now open in After Effects and I have all my lovely clips & layers without the need for Automatic Duck and no transcoding taking place.

What I really now need to figure out is by doing this have I obeyed the "Top Ten Percent Rule" or have I inadvertantly clipped my highlights?

If so, how do I adjust my workflow so I don't?

BTW- Running Media Composer 4 & Adobe After Effects CS4

Cheers in advance Smile

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure with Avid (because of the way it handles the colour values of your footage internally) losing the top 10 percent isn't an issue (that is- so long as you're capturing your footage into Avid). It's when you export the footage and take it into After Effects for onlining that you wanna make sure you interpret your footage properly and apply a levels filter to it so it reads black as 0 instead of 16 (by setting your black value in the levels to 16), and leave your white value at 255 (rather than correcting it to Avid's 235, which should preserve the highlights).

Sounding correct any avid->ae peeps?

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Thanks Deere,

That seems to be the general concesus over at the Avid Community forums.

Although they have said I should go into the settings in After Effects and change the colour space I am working in to 601/709

Would that be in stead of doing the levels adjustment do you think?

If so I would prefer to leave it in the standard colour space and use Stu's levels trick to conform to The Guide Smile

I pretty much always set video footage to 'HDTV (Rec. 709)' in Color Management (that is, any footage that was captured as video- dvcpro, hdv, etc). Looking just now I see you could use 'HDTV (Rec 709) 16-235' with your footage from Avid, only problem I can see with using that option would be that because you're setting your white level to 235, that might be where your super whites are being clipped. If anybody you know is using pro import AE (automatic duck) with Avid, you could check their footage in AE and see how it sets it up in 'interpret footage'. That would probably give you settings that wouldn't clip the super whites.

Don't quote any of this as gospel. There're definitely guys on the Avid forums who would know better than me. There's a chance I haven't got it right- though, in my testing a while back the above settings worked for me to retain super white values. Hope this helps Very Happy

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Thanks Deere,

I have a couple of things to go one now so it's just a case of testing for the best results Smile

Cool, def post the workflow you come up with. Hope it works out for you. If I get a spare sec I'll test some footage with MC4 at work and see if I can get you a definitive answer.

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