Peculiar Brightness change makes color grading nearly impossible

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Peculiar Brightness change makes color grading nearly impossible

I've never had this issue, so not sure what's going on. I've got an animated PNG image sequence as a background for a greenscreen comp.

When looking at the sequence in the timeline, it looks exactly like it should. But on export it is crazily brighter. I tried several export codecs and its the same. Then I noticed that IN THE BROWSER I see the difference in brightness levels when I hover over the individual PNG frames (screen grab of two adjacent PNGs in the browser is attached). The darker version when I hover over it is the one that appears in the timeline and viewer, but the brighter one is what is exporting. The brighter one does not appear anywhere that I can grade to, so its interpreting something? I am using Original Media in the viewer and timeline. What's happening? I've done PNG sequences before without problems, so i don't understand what is different this time. Why does hovering over the image change the brightness/gamma level? Thanks for any advice.

To clarify further: The DARK version corresponds to the original export (from Blender) and what I see when I open the individual PNG in Preview or other apps. It is artificially brighter in FCPX.

FCPX 10.4.6 / High Sierra

Posted on Feb 13, 2021 7:25 AM

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Answer 1

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Javier Bonafont Author

Level 1

21 points

Feb 13, 2021 11:09 AM in response to Javier Bonafont

SOLVED.

Apparently when I restored the system it failed to reinstall the Pro Video Formats file. (why? who knows?) and once that was reinstalled the weird brightness issues disappeared. Thanks all.

Note: why can't FCPX tell you its missing codecs or components to do the job correctly? Seems like a no-brainer alert you should get.

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Answer 2

Feb 13, 2021 9:01 AM in response to Javier Bonafont

UPDATE: I've realized I have this problem on ALL my clips now, where the browser and viewer no longer have the same brightness being rendered. even clips that played perfectly a couple of days ago. I had to do a system restore yesterday and I figure that broke something... but WHAT? FCPX was running great and then I restored everything to fix an unrelated problem and this started happening. :-(

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Answer 3

Feb 13, 2021 9:59 AM in response to Javier Bonafont

Try deleting preferences.

To delete preferences, hold down command and option while starting FCP X and click Delete Preferences. The application will start in a default state, and open an “Untitled” library.

Reopen the library you were working on, set the preferences the way you like them, and try again.

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Peculiar Brightness change makes color grading nearly impossible

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