Whats the difference between the Color Wheels in Final Cut Pro and Apples Color?
In two words: Math. Audience. It all starts with Audience. Final Cut Pro is primarily designed for television and television codecs. It works in YUV* color space. In English, this means the underlying image is processed first as brightness values (Y) and then the color values (UV) are derived with some math that use the Y value as a component in that math. Said even more simply, current video codecs are built upon a simple fact from the early days of television: All color broadcasts needed to be backward compatible with black and white television. This was accomplished by grafting the color information (UV) onto the existing black and white (Y) signal. Thus – today in Final Cut Pro (and any other YUV-based color correction system), pushing and pulling your color wheels have zero effect on the brightness of the image… but the brightness values have a huge effect on color. Apple’s Color was built for film colorists and film workflows which are RGB workflows and use RGB codecs. Notice,
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