Final Cut 4.5 HD	SGI Flame v9	Avid Adreneline 1.35	Adobe Premiere 6.0	iMovie 3.0.3

--History--
Our shop has a number of different video and graphic
systems. When we got our first Final Cut machine,
we could see right away that the same graphic imported
as an animation and a still/freeze didn't match on the timeline.

This isn't critical to the workflow and the mismatch isn't much,
so we put up with it.

I finally got enough material together that I think I can prove
an error in the Final Cut's RGB to Digital Video colorspace conversion.

--The Graphic--
The test picture is a 720:480 JPEG graphic in 8-bit RGB colorspace.

It has 11 steps starting at 0, 0, 0 and ending at 255, 255, 255.
Each step is either 25 or 26 gray values from its neighbors and
they alternate producing an almost perfectly linear rise between
picture black and picture white.

It is expected that this graphic will produce a television waveform
of a square, straight "X".

--Known Errors--
None of the video signals ever reaches 100 units white. This is put down
to a slightly long analog pathway. All the tests have the
same error.

--The Results--
There is significant dark gray distortion in the
Final Cut import. Blacks are brighter than we were expecting.

All the systems got dead black (0, 0, 0) right. However:

The difference between dead black and the first gray step is
normally between 8 and 9 units. In the FCP version, the
difference is more like 11 to 12 units. This is a significant,
visible brightness shift in a television system.

At middle gray (the cross in the "X") most systems arrive at 52 to 53
units. The FCP version is too high at 58.

The distortion appears to be consistent and symmetrical because the
errors are removed when you export an imported still from the timeline.

Two Final Cut 3 and two Final Cut 4.5 machines all do this.

Final Cut's Waveform Monitor will show you these distortions
except on a 0 to 100 basis instead of NTSC 7.5 to 100. In that
case, each gray value should line up perfectly every ten units.

iMovie is the fascinating one. It's not perfect, but it's much
closer to where we supposed it should be than Final Cut.

--Notes--
============
Later tests tell us that DVD Studio Pro has many of these
same--if not exactly the same--still import distortions.

Some splash page graphics were created by an artist and
imported into DVDSP. They look very different than when
the artist created them and they don't match animations in the
menu sysem. Analysis revealed the same error as
in Final Cut.

============
Exporting stills from the FCP timeline and using them in
DVDSP splash screens has never looked right. I'm investigating.

============
I fooled around with Final Cut and was able to get rid of
many of the still import distortions using the two-way or three-way
color corrector with these numeric values:

Highs 263
Mids 93
Blacks (-)9
---Limit on Luma
Luma Min 8
Width 100
Soft 0

Koz