ProRes Everywhere, and End-to-End Color Management

SynthEyes 2204 now offers Apple ProRes codec support in Windows and Linux; previously it was available only in macOS. The tutorial runs through features of the ProRes support, including how to write ProRes files with colorimetry matching the original. A new feature uses presets to ensure Save Sequence always writes with the correct colors.

Script for Search Engines:

Hi, this is Russ Andersson. Apple's ProRes codecs are now available in SynthEyes on Windows and Linux for both reading and writing. And support for ProRes is improved on macOS as well. All platforms support up to 16 bits per channel, and Apple ProRes 4444 and XQ support an alpha channel. There are some new preinstalled color maps to better display ProRes content. You can specify the colorimetry when writing movies. ProRes is now even more suitable for use as a high-quality intermediate format, rather than image sequences, even on Linux and Windows cloud workstations. I'm running here on Windows. I'll open up a sample shot. Remember that if a movie has an alpha channel you want, go to the full shot settings panel and click the Keep Alpha checkbox. Let's take a look at the metadata. The metadata shows that this iPhone movie has HLG colorimetry. HLG follows both R.2020 and R.2100 specifications. However, monitors are mostly R.709. To get a better idea what this shot looks like, I'll hit P to bring up the image preprocessor, and select the R.2020 HLG to R.709A color map. I've selected the A map because the result looks more like what I see on my iMac. Note that R.709 cannot represent all possible colors that R.2020 can, so it won't look as good as a real R.2020 monitor. These are generic 3D color maps; if you want, you can make your own, from Resolve or whatever, to better match your own gear. To be clear, exact color management is not at all required for SynthEyes tracking. You could do nearly anything you want to the colors, maybe invert one channel, and the same tracking data should result, since the camera still moved the same, no matter what the colors look like. Matching colors better is really just for your benefit, and you may want to adjust the levels to make it easier for you to see details in shadows and highlights. Once we've tracked a shot, solved it, and determined lens distortion, we may want to use Save Sequence to write out a new undistorted version of the shot. If we did that now, it would be R.709 data. But, often we want to write out data matching the original shot; here, that's HLG data. To get back to HLG, we need to remove the color map and any other color adjustments we've made. It's easy to forget to do that before a Save Sequence. In SynthEyes 2204, we can set that up to happen automatically. Let's see how to do that. I'm going to go into the Image Preprocessor again and create two presets. First, a Main preset that is what we're seeing now, the right image. Next, a Pass-Through preset that is going to be the original unchanged data. Importantly, I'm going to make the Pass-Through preset affect ONLY the color settings, not any lens distortion or any other parameters we may set up later. I'll clear the 3-D Color Map and right-click any of these other color adjustments to set them back to their defaults. After going back to the Main preset, I can track away, etc. If you want to tweak some of the color settings further, you might want to set up a third, Working, preset also. Once we're ready to save the sequence, we can start that up. We'll select "ProRes Movie" as the file extension, then bring up the compression settings. I'll select ProRes 422 for reasonable quality. Next, I want to be sure to set the Colorimetry setting to HLG, so that the output movie will indicate that the data has the right colorimetry. To make sure we get the right data, select your Pass-Through preset. It will be used only while SynthEyes is writing the movie, and then undone back to the original settings. You can burn in frame numbers or not. Once the movie is written, you can't play it directly on Windows, you'll need to use SynthEyes itself or a 3rd party app. To recap, starting with SynthEyes 2204, you now have better control of colorimetry, for viewing and outputing previews and undistorted shots. Apple ProRes codecs are now a powerful tool to use across all three platforms, Windows, macOS, and Linux. ProRes should be very useful even as production moves into cloud environments. Thanks for watching.