1.5

• If you're handing the project off to another facility, you may want to export the edited
sequence as an XML file for eventual import into Color. In this case, you'll also want to
use the Final Cut Pro Media Manager to copy the project's media to a single,
transportable hard drive volume for easy handoff.
Stage 8: Grading Your Program in Color
Grade your program in Color as you would any other.
Important: When grading scanned film frames for eventual film output, it's essential to
systematically use carefully profiled LUTs (look up tables) for monitor calibration and to
emulate the ultimate look of the project when printed out to film. For more information,
see Using LUTs.
Stage 9: Rendering Graded Media Out of Color
Once you finish grading the project in Color, use the Render Queue to render out the
final media. If the film recording facility you’re working with requires an image sequence,
now is the time to:
• Change the Render File Type to DPX or Cineon, depending on what the facility has
requested.
• Choose the Printing Density to match your facility’s recommendations.
• If you’ve been using a LUT to monitor your program while you work, turn it off by
choosing File > Clear Display LUT. Otherwise, you’ll bake the LUT into the rendered
media.
• Double-check the Broadcast Safe and Internal Pixel Format settings to make sure they’re
appropriate for your project.
Rendering high-resolution media will take time. Keep in mind that the Render Queue has
been set up to let you easily render your project incrementally; for example, you can
render out all the shots of a program that have been graded that day during the following
night to avoid having to render the entire project at once.
However, when you're working on a project using 2K image sequence scans, rendering
the media is only the first step. The rendered output is organized in the specified render
directory in such a way as to easily facilitate managing and rerendering the media for
your Color project, but it's not ready for delivery to the film recording facility until the
next step.
Stage 10: Assembling the Final Image Sequence for Delivery
Once every single shot in your program has been rendered, you need to use the Gather
Rendered Media command to consolidate all the frames that have been rendered,
eliminating handles, rendering dissolves, copying every frame used by the program to a
single directory, and renumbering each frame as a contiguously numbered image
sequence. Once this has been done, the rendered media is ready for delivery to the film
recording facility.
55Chapter 2 Color Correction Workflows