So, I’ve been playing today with a little issue that occurs when roundtripping video between Final Cut and Motion. This is the situation in which you select a clip in your timeline in Final Cut, right click on it and select “send to Motion Project.” Then, you do your Motion work and save the project. When you return to Final Cut, your video clip has magically updated with the composite from Motion. Hoorah!

However, there’s a little glitch that occurs with color rendering during this process. The signal going to Motion doesn’t match the signal that comes back. Here’s an example, taken from an 8bit uncompressed timeline.

Here’s the video as it exists in Final Cut Pro initially

Here’s the video that comes back from Motion

If you look at the histogram and RGB parades, you’ll see a pretty big difference in the images. This isn’t a huge deal in most cases, but I was recently working on a shot that had a heavily saturated green component. There is a very definite shift in both white balance and luminance.

I called ProVideo Support, and they actually reproduced the problem and promised to report it. That’s a first …