Best FCPX legalizer?

How are people feeling about FCPX's legalizer for broadcast deliverables? Are there any third party plugins that are better? I think it's odd that FCP makes you apply the broadcast safe filter twice (once for luma and once for chroma). :dry:

Cheers,
Bill

Hi Bill,

The best way to get quality broadcast safe levels in FCP X is to use the scopes to get your video within reasonable limits before applying any legalizing filter. The broadcast safe filter tends to burn the whites and crash the blacks too easily. The scopes in FCP X are fairly reliable.

Eyeheight has announced a professional legalizing suite for FCP X at IBC, but I don't think it is available yet:

www.tvtechnology.com/editing/0153/eyehei...or-apple-fcpx/237022

-Ronny

Thanks for the feedback, Ronny.

Yep, we use the scopes all day long, especially when color correcting for broadcast. Everything appears to be within spec as we work, but some of our broadcast clients are very stringent and will kick back a master for a stray pixel or two that is just out of legal range.

When we were delivering tape, we always sent the final pass through a hardware legalizer. Different clients had different standards and we set up presets to their specs. Now with tapeless we are relying on the broadcast safe filter (twice) in FCPX. I will look into Eyeheight as an alternative.

Bill

A cheap legaliser for FCPx is actually Resolve light. Export you project as a self contained qt Pro res hq
File and drop into an empty timeline in resolve. Resolve automatically clips video levels to legal
You can even use the clip high and low level in the curve section to smooth out clipped levels.
When you have several projects just put them all into one timeline in resolve because resolve can
render individual files on delivery. Pop the result back into FCP if needed
Sorry wrote this on my iphone
Happy editing

Like Ronny said. I grade with scopes and then compound the final master and add the broadcast filter (just to safe)

I have been using this combo Broadcast Safe Luma/Chroma filter that I made in Motion for a while. Grade with scopes and then add a compound clip and apply this filter as Seanus says. Works for me.

Thanks, everyone! These are great ideas. Much appreciated.

Cheers,
Bill

Just curious, but is broadcast legal relevant in this age of digital broadcasting? If so, why?

Redifer wrote: Just curious, but is broadcast legal relevant in this age of digital broadcasting? If so, why?

Unions.




kidding!

For those who edit on MacMini or MBPR without dedicated GPU (= no DaVinci), Digital Rebelion publish a small utilie to check illegal broadcast values in their "ProMedia" suite.

www.digitalrebellion.com/promedia/
99$ for a single user license and 15 days trial (with proper uninstall procedure).

From the official manual :

Checks video files for illegal luminance values, flash frames, long frames and audio peaks. Results can be exported to Final Cut Pro marker lists, Avid locator lists, CSV and text files. Results can be filtered and sorted according to type or error message, and they can even be color coded for easy recognition.

Bit Depth - This allows you to switch between 8- and 10-bit codecs. 8-bit codecs include DV, DVCPRO HD and HDV, and 10-bit codecs include ProRes and XDCAM EX. 10-bit processing is only supported on OS X 10.7 Lion but 10-bit codecs can still be scanned in 8-bit mode.

Check for excess luma - This checks the value of the luma component (similar to brightness) of each pixel and alerts you if it is out of the range specified by the Maximum black and Minimum white text boxes.

Video Check is very strict and will alert you to minor errors that are probably too small to notice on your software scopes. Each error will be followed by two numbers - the first is the luma value of the lowest or highest pixel in the frame and the second is the percentage of pixels in the entire frame that are outside the limits.

Video Check is designed to inform and it is up to the user to decide what to do based on the results. If the deviation from the legal range is small, the out-of-range values make up less than 1% of the pixels and you cannot spot it by eye in your NLE’s scopes, you may decide that this is an acceptable margin of error.

Check for flash frames - This checks for short black or white flashes that can appear in your video if a gap is inadvertently left in your timeline.

Check for long frames - Each frame in the video should play for the same amount of time, however some frames may play for longer than a single frame, which is usually an indication that frames were dropped when capturing from a tape.

Check for audio peaks - Audio that is too loud will be clipped upon playback, which distorts the sound and is undesirable. This checks for peaking audio.

Check for timecode track - Checks for the presence of a timecode track and alerts you if one doesn’t exist.

Start timecode must be - If your company has a specific policy that requires content to begin at a certain timecode, Video Check can be used to flag up movies that don’t match.

Video signal is the one thing and i use also Resolve to be sure. But what about audio ? How can I in FCPX control and be sure that I've a legalize loudness and true pic ?