Color Management Final Cut Pro

Inside Final Cut Pro there are 4 settings to pay attention to.

First the Library’s color space. Select the library and go to Library Properties. Make sure it is set to Standard Gamut SDR. If that’s not the case, click Modify and change it.

By default the project inside a Standard Gamut SDR Library should be set to Rec709. If you want to make sure, select a project and it should be tagged as Rec709 in the inspector.

If that’s not the case, click modify and change it.

By default Final Cut Pro works with ICC Profile on and Gamma 1.96. This means that the software is always doing the necessary transformations for the image to display correctly inside Final Cut. Back to CineDream, you’ll see this settings are displayed but greyed out as there is no need to change them.

If you notice that your log footage shows transformed to Rec709 inside Final Cut without ever doing any color correction, it means Final Cut is applying a LUT or color space override onto your footage based on its metadata. We don’t want this as CineDream is designed to handle all your color space management and it is expecting to get the native image untouched.

To disable any Final Cut conversion, select all your clips in the Library, go to the Video Inspector and disable Color Conform.

Then go to the Info Inspector and make sure no LUT is applied under Camera LUT.

With the color management settings matched between CineDream and Final Cut Pro you can expect a 1:1 match.