This update brings us some cool stuff: 360 video, advanced color grading, high dynamic range support, HEVC support, updated audio plugins, XML 1.7 and more.

As I suppose there’s gonna be tons of articles covering everything new in a global manner, I wanted to focus in just the color tools. That in itself is just enough to make an extensive post.

To talk about FCPX 10.4 color tools we first need to talk about some concepts.

Rec2020

Color space defines the amount of colors and saturation these can have in the image. In the image above it’s represented what the human eye can see. We are moving from rec709 (small triangle) that is defining HD broadcast to rec2020 (big triangle). What it means is that now we’ll have more reds, greens and blues and they can now reach higher saturation levels which translates in richer and more vibrant images that match better real life colors. FCPX 10.3 already brought rec2020, also called Wide Color Gammut (WCG). We set the color space in the inspector at the library level.

HDR

Then we have HDR or High Dynamic Range. HDR describes video having a dynamic range greater than that of standard-dynamic-range video (SDR video). SDR video, when using a conventional gamma curve and a bit depth of 8-bits per sample, has a dynamic range of about 6 stops. In camera Log modes allow us to retain higher stops of light and high end cameras are capable today to capture 14-16 stops of light but we are limiting how this information is being displayed to us because of SDR limitations. It has been the standard for the last 50 years or so when displays where not capable of today’s levels of brightness. It established a minimum and maximum of brightness. Those levels define total darkness (0 nits) and maximum brightness (100 nits). The big problem with this standard has been the compression of highlights, the difference between the sun, a white car, a puffy cloud and a sheet of paper under a bright sunny day have been in the top 15% of that scale when in real life they are pretty spread out in an imaginary scale. Also the scale for the darkest part of the image is very compressed and there’s small room for deep and rich shadows.

Well, HDR brings us a wider scale. We go from 100 nits to 10000 nits for maximum brightness, and from 8-bits to 12-bits (for Dolby Vision, an HDR PQ format). That’s 100 brighter than today’s broadcast standard. When HDR content is displayed on a 2,000 nits display with a bit depth of 10-bits per sample it has a dynamic range of 17.6 stops. But hold on, there’s no monitor capable of displaying 10000 nits yet. What we are doing at the moment is master at 1000 nits (what the majority of actual HDR TVs are capable of displaying at the moment). That’s still 10 times brighter than SDR. If you want to know more about HDR and PQ (Perceptual Quantizer) I recommend this short video made by Apple (it’s also transcribed in there in case you prefer to read)

In FCPX we set up SDR or HDR spaces in the inspector at the project level.

When we change to Rec2020 PQ the scopes are gonna change scale from SDR to HDR going from 0 to 10K nits.

Media gets auto tagged to the right color space on import but in case it’s wrong we can always change it in the inspector settings.

Mixed color space clips get properly scaled (automagically) in a non matching color space project or can be changed from one format to another with some new tools (read bellow in HDR Conversions), so mixing PQ with HLG and SDR in an SDR or HDR timeline is not a problem.

Color Plugins

We have new tools! Wheels, Color Curves, Hue/ Saturation Curves, Custom LUT and HDR conversion plugins are finally here.

They are accessible thru the effects browser under the color category or directly in the inspector in their own Color Panel (the icon that looks like the first image of the post, or slice of pizza). The old Color Board shortcut, command+6, opens it too.

In the color panel we can do everything color related (except one thing, we’ll get there later, see Conclusion at the bottom). There’s no limit to the amount of corrections we can add to a clip so possibilities are endless.

There’s also the option to add them via shortcut if we assign them in the Command Editor. I recommend creating a special Color keyboard layout and change to it when we start coloring, if not we are gonna have to create complicated shortcuts with multiple modifier keys that are difficult to remember.

Color Wheels

Yes, they are back!!! The color wheels are the universal UI for color. They allow us to change hue, saturation and luminance in one place (no more switching between panels). We have the 3 wheels for adjusting shadows midtones and highlights (lift, gamma, gain) separately. There’s a 4th wheel for overall adjustments. The wheels are placed in order so you would first adjust exposure and color cast with the master wheel and then move to shadows and highlights to add contrast and finally get to the midtones to get to the final tweaks.

There’s also the possibility to enter numeric values for everything to make precise adjustments if we expand the bottom controls to reveal the rest of the UI after the wheels.

All digits can be clicked and dragged to change values, type numbers directly to input the desired value or use up/down arrows to increase/decrease in steps.

It takes a big chunk of the inspector but we have the option to show only one wheel at a time to have a simplified UI by changing the view to single wheels.

The corrections can be keyframed at the top next to the name of the current active correction. Only 2 keyframes are needed to change several values at a time, no need to keyframe each value separately.

We can make secondary corrections by selecting parts of the image using shape masks or color selections clicking the icon next to the keyframe icon. Secondary selections are not new but the good thing is that now we can stay in the color panel to do all this, before it was Color Board <-> Inspector dance. We can also select inside or outside of this selection and have different adjustments for each one in the same correction instance.

We can add as may selections as we want, add separate keyframes to animate and manage them all at the bottom of the color UI.

No, they haven’t got rid of the color board, it’s still there for its fans and it’s still the default color correction. We can change that in the preferences so when the color panel opens the chosen default correction will be the always ready to go.

Curves

Curves are here too. And I love them.

There’s separate Luma and RGB curves. They can be masked and keyframes too. And they also have the same options to display all them or just one at a time for a simplified view or to save screen real estate in small laptops.

What’s interesting is that the RGB curves are not fixed to be just Red, Green and Blue, meaning that we can change any of them to the color we want to affect.

That way we select orange to make accurate skin tone correction or cyan to correct the sky without having to make a secondary color selection first.

Also there’s an eye dropper for each one to click the image in the viewer to add points at that luma level or to change the curve to the clicked value.

Hue/Saturation Curves

We have the typical hue vs hue, hue vs sat, hue vs luma, luma vs sat, sat vs sat, and a special orange vs sat to adjust skin tones.

Again they can be keyframed, use eye dropper to select and at points to the hue, luma or saturation area we want to change, add secondaries with windows or color selections and inside outside corrections for those selections are also possible.

LUT Tool

Simple and needed tool to load LUTs to a clip (or compound clip or adjustment layer) to change the way it looks. It has selectable input and output color spaces.

LUTs are selected via file browser so you can have them organized in folders in the finder, no need to preload them anywhere like some 3rd party plugins. It also remembers recent ones.

HDR Conversions

This is very Apple. They added this simple tool that allows us to change any clip from one format to another and it’s pretty accurate. It also can be used to set the HDR nit level (like the maximum level of an audio mix) using the Peak Brightness slider.

Really powerful but stupid simple.

Things To Remember

There’s the menu at the top of the Color Panel to add corrections, it also let’s us to jump from one correction to another (also by assignable shortcuts, previous and next correction).

You can assign any of the new color plugins to be your default effect and access it with the default effect shortcut, Option+E.

Thaw way you can use CMD+6 to open the Color Panel with the defined default correction (curves fro example) and assign Color Wheels with OPT+E, in case you don’t want to go crazy creating an extensive modified keyboard layout.

If you have a bunch of corrections applied to one clip, you can double click to one from the inspector list and jump straight to it in the Color Panel.

There’s the rage check at the bottom of the viewer options menu to show excess Luma and/or saturation and it has beed updated to HDR support too.

Conclusion

Beefy color update. It brings needed tools for almost everybody and other ones that maybe not a lot of people today (HDR). It also brings some “Apple” approach for things making them vey simple and easy to use like the Orange/Saturation curve aimed to skin tones or the simplicity of the HDR conversion tool. 

There’s a lot digest. And more:

360 video.

Send your iMovie for iOS project directly to Final Cut Pro for advanced editing, audio work, and finishing.

Import, playback, and editing of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, also known as H.265) video clips and High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF) photos from Apple devices.

Send to Compressor to export video projects in the HEVC format

Adjust audio using effects plug-ins from Logic Pro X with redesigned, resizable interfaces.

Support for Canon Cinema RAW Light format with additional software from Canon.

Faster Optical Flow analysis using Metal 2.

Support for NFS-based libraries and media.

XML 1.7 with support for new color grading controls, 360 VR effects, and HDR.

Important things for color that I’m still missing are:

Renaming corrections, so we can label them to what they do for example (like “Contrast”, “Skin Tone Fix”, “Vignette”, “Look”).

Reordering of corrections in the Color Panel (not only in the effects inspector). This is the only color thing we can’t do in the Color Panel.

Link for the Color Curves (Luma/RGB) so when you add a point to one it adds them in the others.

Control surfaces support. Like via MIDI or other kind of protocol where we can change values via hardware wheels, buttons and knobs like the Tangent devices or other.

I hope these come soon.