The Editblog

A package arrived yesterday that contained a shiny, new MC Color control surface from Euphonix. We have the unit under our roof for a month of testing. This surface has been eagerly anticipated by Apple Color-using community for quite a while. First glance right out of the box feels like a very solid unit. We’ll see how it performs both from a hardware and software POV as we test it out in the coming month. Stay tuned to the Editblog on PVC for first impressions and a full review.

First Impressions of the Tangent WaveVideo : the EDITBLOG on PVC by Scott Simmons.

Today I posted a piece over at the Editblog on PVC of my first impression using the Tangent Wave on a few small grading sessions over the last couple of weeks. I really like using a control surface with Color.

The good folks over at Tangent Devices recently sent us one of their control surfaces for testing with Color; the Tangent Wave. After hooking it up and checking it out for an hour or so this afternoon I can say, without a doubt in my mind, that color grading (and using Apple Color in particular) without a control surface dedicated to color grading is like doing most any task with one hand tied behind your back. And that’s mainly from just using the trackballs and dials and not really digging deeper into all the keys and functionality. Stay tuned to the Editblog on PVC for more thoughts, impressions and a full review of the Tangent Wave.

I’m not one to force my political thoughts on to anyone else so I’d certainly never tell anyone who he/she should vote for so please don’t consider this an endorsement of this candidate (I actually think we should throw almost all of Congress out on their ass since they aren’t there representing their constituents anymore [okay, maybe that's forcing my political thoughts]) but I keep seeing this commercial for Lamar Alexander over and over and over (direct You Tube link where you can watch in the You Tube “high quality”) and I can’t help but think how lazy the color grading on the spot really is. It’s not as easy to see in the You Tube clip below as it is on broadcast tv but can get an idea. The majority of the spot looks as if had a preset applied to it with little to no shot specific color grading. In fact, my guess would be it had a preset from Magic Bullet Looks applied to the majority of the spot. It looks a lot like the Grad Sunset:

If you look closely you can see a redish-pink tint applied to the top third of most of the shots regardless of wide shot, 2 shot or close up. Color grading is supposed to be carefully applied shot by shot, scene by scene to achieve a look or a mood that enhances your story, not to make the subject look kind of strange. The color correction challenge over at Prep, Shoot, Post is a good example of this.  Just look at this shot of Alexander’s face:

It’s red near the top and more of a flat skin tone at the bottom! He looks like he is sick. Of course this probably doesn’t matter to the average voter and he will win since he is the incumbent and is an entrenched career politician with so much more money to spend than his closest rival that he’d have to be revealed as a criminal to lose at this point so bad color grading really doesn’t matter. But I thought it was worth pointing out because if you are going to take the time to produce what looks like it could be a nice spot please take a little time to perform a proper color correction session or just don’t do one at all. Lamar should fire his media company. Here’s the entire spot:

And just to give equal time to his main opponent, here’s a link to Bob Tuke’s campaign. But let’s be honest, with Congressional approval near single digits the slate needs to be wiped clean. Elect more Independents!

Colorista is a 3-way color corrector very similar in design to the built-in 3-way color corrector that Apple provides with Final Cut Pro. The first question that most people would ask, myself included, is why would anyone want another 3-way color corrector? The short answer is that it produces much better results. That’s a great reason to supplement any default FCP tool with that from another developer.

Colorista interface in Final Cut Pro

When you apply Colorista to a clip and open its controls in the Viewer you see that it has similar looking color wheels to that in the default FCP 3-way color corrector. But Red Giant Software, makers of the Magic Bullet Suite 2008, call these color wheels lift, gamma, gain which are terms that more resemble that in a high end color grading suite like a DaVinci. A name change is one thing but those things have to have functionality to really make a difference. I think one of the best ways to see how Colorista works it to compare some of the same corrections in both Colorist and the FCP 3-way. Stu Maschwitz of DV Rebels Guide fame is the inventor of Colorista and has done that on his website. Since there is a demo of Colorista available you can do the same and decide if Colorista is right for you. For me, I think color correction and color grading is something best left to a professional colorist. They can do a lot better color work than I can. I’ve seen a real colorist work wonders with the FCP 3-way that made my jaw drop. That said I often need to color correct footage myself so I want a tool that is easy to use and produces great results quickly. That’s what Colorista can do.

Another powerful aspect of Colorista is the Power Mask:

Similar to Power Windows in a DaVinci suite it allows you to mask and isolate only parts of the shot for color correction. You choose a rectangle or ellipse shape and then manipulate the size, positions and feathering. While something similar can be achieved with masking and FCP’s built-in 3-way, having this as part of the Colorista filter makes it much easier and faster to work on a specific part of an image. Positioning the mask is the most difficult thing in FCP since you have to click the position + sign in the filter tab before you can get the target to show in the Canvas to allow click and drag positioning of the mask. In Motion those targets are always visible when the filter is selected. It would be great to see a bezier drawing tool to create a custom shape for the mask as well.

Real power can be achieved with Colorista when you apply multiple Colorista filters to a single clip. A great example of this can be found in Red Giant’s own tutorials. They show examples of Colorista in both Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro and how you can use multiple versions on a single clip for a quickie secondary color correction.

One disadvantage when using Colorista in Final Cut Pro is the realtime playback performance. It isn’t nearly as good as that of the built-in 3-way. Colorista has what is called its DeepColor RT engine that offers better realtime performance by “efficiently using your system’s graphics processing power.” This is true in an app like Motion that utilizes the computer’s graphics card for realtime performance but not the case in FCP. Red Giant suggests using the Unlimited RT setting on an FCP timeline but you will get a lowered resolution during what might be a choppy frame rate. According to Red Giant’s engineers this is due mainly to the way FCP uses the FxPlug technology. It will be a great day when we get an FCP update that can use the graphics card as well as Motion can. Bottom line is you can get great color correction done with Colorist you just have to render it when you are done!

Colorist interface in Motion

And one final thing to like is that Colorista will run on a number of different hosts and they are included in one installer. Not may plug-ins do that:

As you can see Avid is included in that installer list. Currently Colorista won’t run on the newest Avid Media Composer 3.0. The engineers at Red Giant Software are working on updating Colorista to run on the newest version of Avid. If you use Avid you know that is has much more competent color correction that Final Cut Pro so the need for Colorista might be less on Avid. But Avid’s color correction toolset can sometimes be a bit overkill so a simple and good tool like Colorista can be good to have on Avid as well. Now if they can just get it updated to run on MC Soft 3.0.

What’s next for Colorista? danrubottom posted a couple of suggestions via Twitter a while back that would be nice:

That’s a great recommendation for the next version. If they would build a powerful secondary color correction tool into Colorista as well then it would more than double the power of the tool. Colorista might still be considered early in its life so there is a lot of room to grow. It’s also a good tip to know that when you are working on the overall settings for the lift/gamma/gain you may feel like you want to drag around the circle of the color wheel to move the slider. It’s designed to follow the left and right moves of your mouse. If you stick with left / right movement then it will work a lot better. There’s other 3rd party color correction tools available; Color Finesse and Apple’s own Color but for a great price / performance ratio it’s hard to beat Colorista. And since there is a demo available there’s really no reason not to the Colorista for you color correction needs.