Rant: 16-Bit RAW

I’ve already made my aversion to external recording solutions known in plenty of previous posts: they add bulk, require additional power solutions, cables, SSDs, magic arms and a cage – unless you’re one of the cool guys willing to gamble on mounting one directly to the hot shoe of the camera! Firmware updates to older… Read More

Selling My Asus ProArt PA32UCX-K!

Whether grading Rec. 709 or HDR footage, the colors of the Asus are too warm; and in order to calibrate the monitor, I’d need to shell out another $1,600.00 for the Teranex Mini SDI to HDMI 8K HDR, with no guarantee that the colors would be any better. For only $1,300.00, you can pick up… Read More

Asus PA32UCX: First Impressions

Apart from uploading a handful of Sony HLG HDR videos to YouTube last year – mostly out of morbid curiosity – I’d pretty much all but given up on HDR, for the simple reason that there were no remotely affordable monitors. That all changed last month when I learned about the Asus ProArt 32UCX at… Read More

Is An I/O Interface Really Necessary?

Update 23.01.2020: I have confirmed that the Asus PA32UCX, UltraStudio 4K Mini and Final Cut Pro do indeed work with HDR PQ. The reason to use a dedicated IO card (like the UltraStudio 4K) is that it gives you a properly managed colour pipeline that by-passes the operating system’s GPU and colour profile settings and gets… Read More

Achieve Perfect Color and Skin Tones in FCP X, Part I

In a previous post, we looked at how to expose for skin tones, and now we deal with how to turn those properly exposed clips into beautiful looking footage through color correction. This is an abbreviated version of Caleb Pike’s wonderful tutorial on YouTube in which he explains how to get perfect color every time… Read More

How to Upload Sony HLG HDR to YouTube from Final Cut Pro X in 2 Minutes

Note: Apparently, FCPX update 10.4.6 was supposed to finally address the stability issue that has plagued Final Cut for so long, whereby sharing to YouTube from within the app would inevitably fail; nevertheless, as of this writing, I still suggest making a master file. Update: Occasionally, my master files weren’t recognized as HLG HDR videos by YouTube… Read More

Closed Captions in FCP X 10.4.1

The closed captions feature in Final Cut Pro v.10.4.1 is a real godsend for those of us recording documentaries and interviews in a foreign language. Adding text to the timeline – a tedious process that used to take hours – now takes just minutes when used in conjunction with real-time voice translation in Google Translate.… Read More