Adobe AFTER EFFECTS CS3 PROFESSIONAL User Manual page 256

If you notice that colors of imported footage look wrong—blacks don't look black enough, and whites don't look
white enough—make sure that you've assigned the correct input color profile. The common video color profiles
included with After Effects include variants that account for these limited ranges, such as the HDTV (Rec. 709) 16-
235 color profile, which interprets 16 as black and 235 as white.
Note: Some video cards and encoders assume that output is in the range 0-255, so limiting colors in your composition
and rendered movie may be redundant and lead to an undesired compression of the color range. If colors of your output
movie look dull, try assigning an output color profile that uses the full range of colors.
You can use the Broadcast Colors effect to reduce luminance or saturation to a safe level, but the best way to limit
output colors to the broadcast-safe range is to create your composition to not use colors out of this range. Keep the
following guidelines in mind:
• Avoid pure black and pure white values.
• Avoid using highly saturated colors.
• Render a test movie and play it on a video monitor to ensure that colors are represented accurately.
The Color Finesse plug-in included with After Effects includes excellent tools that can help you keep your colors
within the broadcast-safe range. For more information, see the Color Finesse documentation in the following folder:
Adobe After Effects CS3/Additional Documentation/Color Finesse 2.
Note: After Effects 7.0 had an Expand ITU-R 601 Luma Levels option in the Interpret Footage dialog box. When opened
in After Effects CS3 or later, footage items in projects created with this option will have a corresponding assigned profile.
Working with Cineon footage items
A common part of the motion-picture film production workflow is scanning the film and encoding the frames into
the Cineon file format. The DPX (Digital Picture Exchange) format is a standard format closely related to the Cineon
format.
Cineon data is stored in a logarithmic format, with each color channel taking up 10 bits.
Cineon data has a 10-bit white point of 685 and a 10-bit black point of 95. Values above 685 are retained, but are
treated as highlights. Rather than abruptly clipping highlights to white, After Effects interprets highlights using a
gradual ramp defined by the Highlight Rolloff value. You can modify the 10-bit white point and 10-bit black point
input levels and the output (converted) white point and black point levels to match your specific footage items or
creative needs.
Use a project color depth of 32 bpc when working with Cineon footage items so that highlights are preserved, in
which case you don't need to roll off the highlights.
There are three basic ways of working with Cineon footage items in After Effects:
• The easiest—and recommended—way is to enable color management and assign an input color profile to a
Cineon footage item in the Color Management tab of the Interpret Footage dialog box, corresponding to the film
stock on which the footage was recorded. Of course, if creating output for film, you should use the same profile as
the output color profile so that the output file matches the film stock. One advantage of using color management
features to work with Cineon footage items is that compositing with images from other footage types is made
easier. See "Interpret a footage item by assigning an input color profile" on page 244.
• If you need to manually modify the settings for a Cineon footage item, or if you don't want to use color
management, then you can use the Cineon Settings dialog box. To open this dialog box, click the Cineon Settings
button in the Color Management tab of the Interpret Footage dialog box.
AFTER EFFECTS CS3 250
User Guide