FCP X imports video with too much red

[xizar]

I've got a few clips I've recorded from World of Warcraft using WoW's built-in screen recorder and have noticed that most everything I try to import into FCP X looks as though red cellophane is laid over everything.

Ordinarily I'd think this was just WoW screwing up but when I view the video through Quicktime or VLC or import clips into iMovie, everything appears as expected.

I made exported via FCP X an example which shows what I'm talking about, I hope.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmRaLNrkhHo

I had this before and after upgrading to Lion with both AIC and H.264.

I haven't had sufficient opportunity to try other stuff from my snap-shot camera or iPhone since I started messing around with FCP.

Any ideas as to how I can fix this? Is this an Apple bug?

Thanks for your input and advice.

 

[Mr-Stabby]

When you go to import the file, you don't have the 'analyse for balance colour' option enabled do you? Just a guess really, that might not mean anything.

 

[xizar]

I did drag'n'drop importing with the videos, but when I look at the info panel for the clip in FCPX, it says that the balance is not analyzed. If I tick the box, it turns stuff purple. When I analyze it for color,

I did some rooting around and discovered that the second clip (the red one) was, in fact, exported as h.264. I exported some other junk and made sure that it exported as AIC this time and those imported fine.

Does it matter that I have x264 installed? (I think I picked it up because I was ripping some DVDs and was told that x264 looked better and made smaller files.)

So, my question, then, boils down to "how do I make FCPX properly import h.264 stuff?" Should I try converting them to another format? Is there a "simple" way to recapture the videos via playback?

Again, thanks for your help.

edit:
After fighting with handbrake and vlc for some time, trying to convert the file, I got mpeg streamclip to convert the file to AIC, which FCPX read fine. The loss in quality was disappointed, but w/e.

I still wish I understood why it won't import the h264 properly.

 

[acearchie]

Do you potentially have a computer with a graphics card that isn't supported by FCPX?

Apart from that try converting it to ProRes422 instead of AIC. You shouldn't see as much quality loss.

 

[VideoCave]

RE redline

Even though FC says you can import anything which is basically true. What FCPX is basically doing is reEncoding everything being imported so thats its what it wants to work with. Anything other then a prores codec (which is what FC prefers) or some other format that is an uncompressed codec is wrong. h.264, mpeg etc are compressed codecs which are not native file formats for editing. And you need to make sure the audio codec with in the file is linear pcm. aac/mp3 or anything else once again is a compressed codec and you will always have to be rendering your timeline. If its just an audio file it needs to be an Aiff.

When ever you get video from one of these cheap video ripers or from somebody else always check to make sure its correct for editing, if it is not, reEncode it to be correct.

Just because something has .mov at the end doesn't mean anything. MOV is whats called a wrapper even though it looks the same from the outside everything that makes that work on the inside can be different. Its the codecs being used that need to be correct.

 

[acearchie]

Even though FC says you can import anything which is basically true. What FCPX is basically doing is reEncoding everything being imported so thats its what it wants to work with.

But FCPX can actually natively edit h.264 without transcoding...

 

[xizar]

I don't know about the video card. I'm using a late 2009 27" iMac; it's some ATI card.
What difference would it make on how FCPX takes the video in? (I'm not challenging your point. I'm curious if the hardware would make FCPX display things differently than QuickTime.)

As it is, my needs are very low-key; I decided that (especially since I'm just YouTubing), even though the conversion ick'd things up, to use to upload. As it is, I'm uploading to YouTube straight from FCP right now.

I'm basically using daddy's powertools to nail a hammer (crookedly) in a board. I am, at best, costing Google money by wasting storage space on their servers, but hopefully the other people in my raid appreciate it.

I hope to start messing around with things in a more elaborate fashion.

 

[Mattityahu]

My Fix

Thanks to the messages here I was able to import my file without the red overlay. All I did was export it at highest quality from quicktime as a .mov and it worked right away.