Working with cineon footage items – Adobe After Effects CS3 User Manual
Page 256
AFTER EFFECTS CS3
User Guide
251
The Color Finesse plug-in included with After Effects includes excellent tools that can help you keep your colors
within the broadcast-safe range. For more information, see the Color Finesse documentation in the folder containing
the Color Finesse plug-in.
Note: After Effects 7.0 had an Expand ITU-R 601 Luma Levels option in the Interpret Footage dialog box. When opened
in After Effects CS3 or later, footage items in projects created with this option will have a corresponding assigned profile.
Working with Cineon footage items
A common part of the motion-picture film production workflow is scanning the film and encoding the frames into
the Cineon file format. The DPX (Digital Picture Exchange) format is a standard format closely related to the Cineon
format.
Cineon data is stored in a logarithmic format, with each color channel taking up 10 bits.
Stu Maschwitz has a blog post that goes into some of the finer details of what it means to say that Cineon files' color
values are in a logarithmic color space:
.
Cineon data has a 10-bit white point of 685 and a 10-bit black point of 95. Values above 685 are retained, but are
treated as highlights. Rather than abruptly clipping highlights to white, After Effects interprets highlights using a
gradual ramp defined by the Highlight Rolloff value. You can modify the 10-bit white point and 10-bit black point
input levels and the output (converted) white point and black point levels to match your specific footage items or
creative needs.
Use a project color depth of 32 bpc when working with Cineon footage items so that highlights are preserved, in
which case you don’t need to roll off the highlights.
There are three basic ways of working with Cineon footage items in After Effects:
•
The easiest—and recommended—way is to enable color management and assign an input color profile to a
Cineon footage item in the Color Management tab of the Interpret Footage dialog box, corresponding to the film
stock on which the footage was recorded. Of course, if creating output for film, you should use the same profile as
the output color profile so that the output file matches the film stock. One advantage of using color management
features to work with Cineon footage items is that compositing with images from other footage types is made
easier. See “Interpret a footage item by assigning an input color profile” on page 245.
•
If you need to manually modify the settings for a Cineon footage item, or if you don’t want to use color
management, then you can use the Cineon Settings dialog box. To open this dialog box, click the Cineon Settings
button in the Color Management tab of the Interpret Footage dialog box.
•
If you need the settings for the interpretation of the Cineon footage item to change over time, then you can apply
the Cineon Converter effect to a layer that uses the Cineon footage item as its source.
See also