Semitransparent Elements in Files Exported From After Effects With Alpha Channel

Hey all. This is a repost of a thread I made on Twitter:

This is the #FinalCutPro bug that I am most desperate to be fixed. I've reported it many times over... spanning years. IT'S TIME TO FIX THIS! If you create a file with an alpha and semitransparent elements in After Effects, when the file is placed in Final Cut Pro the semitransparent elements render incorrectly. Specifically things like soft drop shadows. Here is a sample with the same graphic composited and rendered intact (with BG) out of After Effects... followed by just the text elements rendered out with an alpha and then married with the background in FCP.



Note that the drop shadows composited within FCP are not as dark/opaque. Now here are the same text elements composited in DaVinci Resolve. Note that all instances match the self-contained AE render exactly.



I tried all combinations of alpha rendering in AE and alpha handling in FCP (premultiplication, codec, bitdepth) to no avail. Naturally these same elements composite properly in Premiere. Any thoughts? Anyone notice this and have a workaround? Here is a .zip of the project files.

drive.google.com/file/d/1-gBTi4dqcuz9RWo...VB7/view?usp=sharing

Hey all. This is a repost of a thread I made on Twitter:

This is the #FinalCutPro bug that I am most desperate to be fixed. I've reported it many times over... spanning years. IT'S TIME TO FIX THIS! If you create a file with an alpha and semitransparent elements in After Effects, when the file is placed in Final Cut Pro the semitransparent elements render incorrectly. Specifically things like soft drop shadows. Here is a sample with the same graphic composited and rendered intact (with BG) out of After Effects... followed by just the text elements rendered out with an alpha and then married with the background in FCP.



Note that the drop shadows composited within FCP are not as dark/opaque. Now here are the same text elements composited in DaVinci Resolve. Note that all instances match the self-contained AE render exactly. 



I tried all combinations of alpha rendering in AE and alpha handling in FCP (premultiplication, codec, bitdepth) to no avail. Naturally these same elements composite properly in Premiere. Any thoughts? Anyone notice this and have a workaround? Here is a .zip of the project files.

drive.google.com/file/d/1-gBTi4dqcuz9RWo...VB7/view?usp=sharing

The second video seems linked to the same file as the first.

This is not a bug. It is what the developers of Final Cut Pro thought what give the best results. Have a look into this white paper:  images.apple.com/final-cut-pro/docs/Work..._Final_Cut_Pro_X.pdf
It clearly states that the FCP color management transforms everything into a "linearized version of the Rec. 709 color space". The important word here is LINEAR. If you set After Effects into linear compositing mode (gamma=1.0), the results should look identical. Haven't tried it myself as I am an apple motion user. Please let us know if it fixes the problem.

Thanks, Tom. I've updated the link to the second video in the OP

I've tried your suggestion. In anticipation of this, I changed the face colour of the text objects in my test file. In the colour management section of the AE module I set the "Convert to linear light" to "ON". This succeeded in completely munging the colours of my text objects (whereas before they were the same as they were in AE) while still messing up the transparency values of the drop shadow elements as they had done before. Coincidentally, enabling this option in After Effects brought my render times from 5 seconds to 6 minutes and 56 seconds.  So, still seems like a bug to me - especially since EVERY OTHER EDITING APP ON THE MARKET handles these After Effects outputs with alpha channels flawlessly.

editDr0ideka wrote:

This is not a bug. It is what the developers of Final Cut Pro thought what give the best results. Have a look into this white paper: images.apple.com/final-cut-pro/docs/Work..._Final_Cut_Pro_X.pdf
It clearly states that the FCP color management transforms everything into a "linearized version of the Rec. 709 color space". The important word here is LINEAR. If you set After Effects into linear compositing mode (gamma=1.0), the results should look identical. Haven't tried it myself as I am an apple motion user. Please let us know if it fixes the problem.

I think we are facing the same problem, and it's even more obvious for me ...