Apple Color 1.5 - Manual (Page 39)

• Final Cut Pro generators and Motion projects: Final Cut Pro generators and Motion projects
are completely ignored by Color. How you handle these types of effects also depends
on your workflow:
• If you're roundtripping a project between Final Cut Pro and Color, and you want to
grade these effects in Color, you should render these effects as self-contained
QuickTime .mov files. Then, edit the new .mov files into your sequence to replace
the original effects shots prior to sending your project to Color.
• If you're roundtripping a project between Final Cut Pro and Color, and there's no
need to grade these effects, you don't need to do anything. Even though these effects
aren't displayed in Color, their position in the Timeline is preserved, and these effects
will reappear in Final Cut Pro when you send the project back. Titles are a good
example of effects that don't usually need to be graded.
• If you're working on a 2K or 4K digital intermediate or RED QuickTime project, you
need to use a compositing application like Shake or Motion to composite any effects
using the image sequence data.
Important: When you send frames of media to a compositing application, it's vital that
you maintain the frame number in the filenames of new image sequence media that
you generate. Each image file's frame number identifies its position in that program's
Timeline, so any effects being created as part of a 2K digital intermediate workflow
require careful file management.
• Video or film output: While Color provides broadcast output of your project's playback
for preview purposes, this is not intended to be used to output your program to tape.
This means that when you finish color correcting your project in Color, the rendered
output needs to be moved to Final Cut Pro for output to tape or to another environment
for film output.
Video Finishing Workflows Using Final Cut Pro
If a program has been edited using Final Cut Pro, the process of moving it into Color is
fairly straightforward. After editing the program in Final Cut Pro, you must reconform the
program, if necessary, to use the original source media at its highest available quality.
39 Chapter 2 Color Correction Workflows