Editing Tip – Darkening QuickTime Exports

So we’re wrapping up editing on The Temp Life this weekend and I’m in the midst of adjusting brightness levels for the exported files. One thing that Final Cut editors may notice is when you export out into a Quick Time file*,  everything brightens up a few levels.

Quick tip on how to adjust for this:

1) Drop your final sequence in a nested sequence

2) Pull in any random clip that has no filters currently being applied into your timeline

3) Apply effects/video filters/image control –> brightness and contrast

4) Go into the random clip filters tab and darken the brightness levels by  -10 (you will want to test to figure out what the right number is)

5) Copy the clip and then click/highlight your nested sequence. Go to edit/past attributes and select filter. Your entire final sequence will go darker (uncomfortably so)

6) Export out your final sequence to QT and compare versus the FCP version. It should look similar.

*The export that I’m doing is mp4 with H.264 compression. Your QT exports may look different than mine so you may need to play around to figure out what, if any, adjustments need to be made in brightness. Of course, you can use the basic concept above to apply any sort of filters across your full sequences.