I have a problem for some time with videos created with Sony cameras (ZV1, AX43).
The problem is color transfer characteristics listed as “unknown (11)”. Shotcut wants me to convert every file to the “easy to edit” format and it’s annoying. What’s interesting Shotcut can read the color transfer under more information tab:
color_space=bt709
color_transfer=iec61966-2-4
color_primaries=bt709
What is more interesting in older versions I didn’t had this problem (sorry, I don"t remember the version as I was editing on 3 different PCs and now have only one)
Any idea? Can I ignore the conversion window or should I convert? I hate it because the best quality option creates huge files and medium quality (MOV) is messing up with the sharpens. And it takes time …
OR
Maybe it’s camera settings? Unfortunately few different people use them so maybe some changed something in the settings I’m unaware?
It is more likely that the videos produced by the camera are “variable frame rate”. This is the explanation Dan gave when he introduced “Edit-Friendly” in Shotcut 17.12:
Shotcut tries hard to let you edit with many audio and video formats directly without a conversion or import process. However, like most video editors, there are some things that it simply cannot handle such as variable frame rate. Unfortunately many screen, game, and device capture tools create such files. Also, in order to support editing, Shotcut must be able to seek to a frame. This version now tries to detect if a file is variable frame rate or non-seekable and present a dialog to Convert to Edit-friendly format. To keep the process rather simple but still satisfy different users’ needs, it offers 3 pre-defined options. More than likely, all of them will create a file that is larger than the original, which is normal. However, at least you get some choice.
In addition, Shotcut (via MLT & FFmpeg) only does a basic seek test. When it succeeds, it is still not guaranteed to be frame accurate—that depends on many factors: format, codec, parameters of codec, the tool that wrote it, FFmpeg’s code, MLT’s code, versions, etc. There is simply no good way to reliably test for that at the moment. Also, even when seeking works, some files and the way they were encoded seek slowly and may require Settings > Interpolation > Bilinear or better to increase accuracy making it even slower. Therefore, you can choose to convert any audio or video clip to one of the edit-friendly (frame accurate and relatively fast-seeking) formats by using Properties > Menu > Convert to Edit-friendly….
That’s Sony xvYCC, which is a method of expanding the colour Gamut from the early noughties. Basically it allows negative values in the RGB values - which means the software you’re using needs to do something to out of gamut colours. The easiest is probably to clip them to BT.709.