Thoughts on Apple's Color

written on Monday, 12th January, 2009

Sometimes while working with computers you run into stupid problems. The computer wants you to start everything from the beginning, only because you forgot to set a setting. But mostly, one hour of creative thinking lets you develop a fast solution. This time I ran into Apple's Color.

After I solved my problem with Color it again approved our way of working:

Never choose the think less, click more way of solving an issue...

But now to my problem: My friend Jens from Barracuda Film helped me out on a color grading project a fellow student shot last summer. We worked with Apple's Color 1.04 on am MacPro. He worked the entire weekend on that project, but when I came to the studio today and wanted to render the grades and export everything to Final Cut Pro, I discovered that Color's framerate setting was set to 24 fps. Unfortunately Color does not allow you to change this setting during working, so the rendered ProRes Quicktime files were all in 24fps. And the timeline export to Final Cut Pro was also in 24fps so the sound was not in sync anymore. We had a DVCPRO HD 25fps timeline in Final Cut Pro. But the editor worked with sequences as source material, so we had a timeline full of nested sequences and Color cannot deal with that at all. So the send to Color option was not a good deal for us. Because the film is only about 15 minutes long we decided to add the edits in Color while grading. In Color the source footage was in 25fps, but the project was set to 24fps. And that messed it up as I discovered later...

I searched every handbook, forum, website which had anything to do with that problem but none had a solution for me. But then I tried my own Shake style way. Because Shake saves everything in a script you can alter it, i.e. when Shake keeps on crashing on boot up, because it can't find the source footage. In this case you can solve the problem by relinking the footage manually or simply disabling the node.
In my case Apple hides everything in the color project file. You have to access the content by right clicking it and then show package content. There your find a file with the ending *.pdl . In this file Color saves a lot of stuff including the framerate setting. I simply changed this setting in row 6 to 25fps and Color started without crashing. After that the final renderings were correct and the export to Final Cut Pro worked. I think this only worked so easily because the source footage is also in 25fps. But I wonder why this setting is greyed out in the GUI.