1.5

Stage 5: Preparing Your Final Cut Pro Sequence
To prepare your edited sequence for an efficient workflow in Color, follow the steps
outlined in Before You Export Your Final Cut Pro Project. If you’re planning on printing
to film, it’s prudent to be even more cautious and eliminate any and all effects that are
unsupported by Color, since the media rendered by Color will be the final media that’s
delivered to the film recording facility.
• Clips using speed effects should be rendered as self-contained QuickTime movies, with
the resulting media files reedited into the Timeline to replace the original effects. This
is also true for any clip with effects you want to preserve in the final program, including
filters, animated effects, composites, opacity settings, and embedded Motion projects.
• The only type of transition that Color is capable of processing is the dissolve. Any other
type of transition in the sequence will be rendered as a dissolve of identical duration.
• The only other types of effect that Color supports are Position, Rotation, Scale, and
Aspect Ratio Motion tab settings, which are converted into Pan & Scan room settings.
While keyframes for these settings in Final Cut Pro cannot be sent to Color, the Pan &
Scan settings can be keyframed in Color later.
Stage 6: Sending the Finished Sequence to Color
When you finish prepping your edited sequence, there are two ways you can send it to
Color.
• If Color is installed on the same computer as Final Cut Pro, you can use the Send To
Color command to move an entire edited sequence to Color, automatically creating a
new project file.
• If you're handing off the project 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 7: Grading Using Additional RED Tab Settings in the Primary In Room
Once in Color, you have access to each clip’s camera setting metadata via the RED tab in
the Primary In room. You can use the RED image data as is, or make adjustments as
necessary. For more information, see The RED Tab.
You may also find it to your advantage to use a proxy setting in Color to speed up effects
processing as you work, especially if you’re working with 4K source media. For example,
setting Grading Proxy to Half Resolution and Playback Proxy to Quarter Resolution will
significantly improve real-time performance as you work in Color, while still allowing you
to monitor your data with complete color accuracy at approximately 1K. For more
information, see Using Proxies.
Important: Clips that have been transcoded to Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) cannot access
these native camera settings, as they no longer contain the native RED raw image data.
61Chapter 2 Color Correction Workflows