"Cloudy" Footage when Exporting ProRes 422 Timeline

I am having the same problem and would appreciate some help with this problem

Try enabling Final Cut Pro Color Compatiblity in your QuickTime Player preferences. This should fix the color managment issue in that app. But as for the Finder, I'm not aware of a way to enable color management of Quicktime content in the finder.

Thanks for chiming in, Mathew. My problem goes beyond color issues. I'll explain. I shot footage with a Canon 5dMkII and Sony HDV. I used prores 422 as the sequence setting in FCP6 and exported as a reference file. I bring this into Compressor, and have tried various mpeg2 settings, as well as bringing the prores files direct into DVD Studio Pro. When viewing the reference files on my computer everything looks sharp. After creating a .img file in DVD Studio Pro or even burning a dual layer DVD direct in DVDSP, the result is that the faces are blown out with very bad detail in long shots taken with the Canon 5dMkII. The closeups look OK, shot with the Sony HDV. There is ghosting around some of the images. Whites appear too bright. The video viewed on my Mac looks good, but the DVD *****. I even bought Cram Compressor today to try some of their settings, and it all looks the same. I am really stumped on this one, and would greatly appreciate some guidance.

I too use a Canon mark II and post at cinema5D.com all the time. You might find some helpful resources there for shooting and handling the footage from that camera. I suggest this because you said the Sony HDV camera looks OK compared to the 5D footage. My 5D footage beats all my HDV cameras in highlight detail so this is suspicious.

The 5D is a challenging (and rewarding) camera but the exposure system is hard to manage. It is possible your footage was over exposed in-camera. If not, you can try running the footage through Apple Color and check the video scopes. Areas around the faces should be around 55 to 65 IRE in the Waveform monitor. Your display might need to be calibrated. This would explain the difference between the computer monitor and the TV output. It is also possible you have not updated Quicktime. There was a big update to QuickTime which fixed the way the Canon h264 files are interpreted and this fixed most issues like the ones you are describing.

Your camera also should have the latest firmware update from Canon which added manual controls in the M mode. Without this, the camera is constantly changing its exposure during the clip and will tend to blow out highlight details easily if there is a predominance of dark colors in the scene.

Also, you can try enabling highlight tone priority on the camera, which is sort of like a Black Stretch mode on some camcorders which adds a stop of highlight detail.

Regardless, the fact that it looks the same in all mediums except your computer monitor suggests the problem is a poorly calibrated monitor. I'll bet your footage is not properly exposed, but for some reason it appears to be this way on a dimly set monitor. Forgive me if I've over simplified the problem.

One last test you can do is change your compression settings to Animation and render just a few frames. Don't do too many, because the file will be huge. Animation doesn't use any color management (this is called absolute colormetrics) wherein the ProRes and h264 CODEC's are relative colormetric. If the footage still looks wrong in animation compression, you can eliminate the gamma shift/color management from your list of culprits. Hope that helps you figure this out.