Why Colorista?
Monday, December 18, 2006 at 11:37AM
Why did we make a 3-way color corrector to sell to people who, with the exception of After Effects users, already have a built-in 3-way CC tool? Six reasons:
Correct Like The Pros
Colorista works like Final Touch, Da Vinci, Discrete Lustre, iQ, and other professional grading systems that use the industry standard color model of Lift, Gamma and Gain. The ASC is even working towards codifying this into a system that can be communicated as universally as an EDL. Lift/Gamma/Gain allows you to correct highlights, midtones and shadows, respectively, but without the need to define the value ranges, which means you spend more time color correcting and less time fiddling with controls. In other words…
Fewer Controls, More Power
Colorists need to work fast and efficiently, so having fewer knobs is a good thing. We took the most-used aspects of professional grading systems and packed them into an efficient, easy to use package. Colorista does more than most built-in 3-ways, and with fewer controls.
Power Masks
Isolating areas of the frame to correct is one of the power tools in the colorist’s kit. What can you do with piddly little circles and squares? Ask a Da Vinci operator. Sure, sometimes you need deeper masking, but for that you can jump into After Effects. Face lights, vignettes, and spot corrections should be fast, easy, and render in realtime.
Realtime?
Depending on your hardware and video resolution, yes! Works especially well in host applications that lead the market in realtime operation, such as Apple Motion and Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0.
Grade, Don’t Degrade
In After Effects 7, Colorista is a 32-bit floating-point plug-in. Stack as many of them on top of each other as you want, you cannot hurt your image. Finally, a tool you can use to effortlessly color correct HDR images.
Three Rings to Rule Them All
Just when you started to master Levels, you need to do some color work in Final Cut Pro. Just when you learn to produce decent results with FCP’s 3-way, you take a freelance gig using Avid. Colorista works the same in every host application, meaning that you can learn it once and use it everywhere. And one seat of Colorista licenses you to use the plug-in in every one of the host applications, on Mac or Windows.
The music on the demo is Color My Rainbow Black by The Quintessentials.
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Reader Comments (22)
From the video it looks like colorista doesn't, in and of itself, have tracking controls for the windows?
Interesting product by the way! Simple and to the point - perfect for what a lot of people want and need.
Hi Stu,
thanks for all the good info, tips and products. I am really looking forward to reading the book as well. I like the fact that your company is so high-end, but you clearly have a passion for the very indie side of filmmaking/storytelling. I think your efforts will help a lot of young filmmakers.
Now that I have finished tossing you off...
Colorista seems itself a good product. I wonder, like others whether it will strike the right balance. I haven't played with Color finesse since Beta stage and didn't like it then. Final Touch is a great product, but similarly, we have one and it is not a complete product. This leads into the big question of how that product will mature now that Apple acquired it.
I like this produce because although three-way CC has it purposes and can be used in a pinch, it is no ones first choice. This product offer much more functionality and will be quickly accessible to editors. Being 32 Bit is a big plus as is the cross platform application. I have 40 editors at work that all are learning FCP and most do struggle to keep fresh on both that and Avid.
Thanks again.
Paul
www.hdto35.blogspot.com
Aaron, the plug-in doesn't ahve any kind of tracking built-in, but it ships with some After Effects presets, including one called "Colorista Tracked" that gives you a cross-hair to paste your track date onto for easy tracking.
Oh dear, God, please please let this awesome plug-in develop secondary color corrections!
Hey Stu,
The product looks awesome especially after watching the demos by you and eric, however i cant get the plugin to work on AE7 on my machine i keep getting the prompt "After Effects error: Couldn't find main entry point for MBCC.plugin"
is this because i dont have Tiger running on my sys i have 10.3.9 or could it be quicktime i have 7.1.3 running on a g5 dual 2.5 ghz with 3gb of ram.
thanks.
Colorista definitely requires 10.4.3 or later to run on Mac OS X. We use several of the extensions in OpenGL for speed that only appear in 10.4.3 and later. Sorry, to run Colorista with maximum speed you will need to upgrade to Tiger.
I have tried the demo today, features and speed are really great. the only downside is that it crashes my after effects [ mac, AEP 7.1] as soon as i try to playback a preview render (hitting 0 on the keypad once-renders everything quick & fine - hitting it a second time-crash...)
http://www.salatar.com/cc/cc.setting
what you think Stu?
http://www.salatar.com/cc/CC.setting
opps nix likes caps
Hi Stu,
On the demo it says it won't "Flash" the blacks when correcting the shadows. To be clear, for example, when I move the Shadows (In Avid DS) to a particular hue offeset, the blacks lift as well as change hue which is annoying. Colorista avoids this?
So can you get a look like Stefan Sonnenfeld does all the time where he will have Cyanish blacks, and yellowish highlites, but the very Blacks and very whites are pure as the snow?
Chris, I couldn't have said it better myself! In fact, that very color palette you describe is shipped with the After Effects version as a preset. You can see this at work in the movie—as I tint the shadows blue, black stays nice and rich.
Hi Stu,
I left this comment at Red Giant too; but I tried the FCP demo and I want to point out it would be nice if there was more well-calibrated mouse-wheel response in the filter (especially for adjusting sliders). In the current version, holding the cursor over a slider and rolling the mousewheel causes the values to jump by too-large increments. This is a bummer as using the mousewheel has become a major timesaver in using FCP filters and it also works in FCP's 3way CC. Would be awesome if Colorista would respond in the same way. BTW digitalheaven.co.uk covers this aspect of FCP interaction in one of their podcasts.
Nice, clean and easy application, loved the simple interface. Bought a copy today at Redgiant, well spent 199$. Thanks Stu!
Hello Stu,
At our postrpoduction studio (founded by DV Rebels rules) we are always doing following workflow:
First do raw color correction in Premiere Pro using basic filters like levels, hue/sat, color balance etc. It is very fast, usually realtime work. I can preview whole scenes, have good control over color continuity. Then I import Premiere Pro project into After Effects and fine tune all filters, aply masks and use other great tools AE is offering. This ability of importing PPRO project into AE is great way to avoid multiple recompression, YUV-RGB interpretation, especially when working with some highly compressed material like HDV. I work in AE with the same source material as in PPRO and render only once from AE to uncompressed format. To maintain color correction settings done in PPRO in AE, I am using just filters which are transferred into AE with its values set up in PPRO.
When I first saw MB Colorista I have to admit it is wonderfull tool. I have dovnloaded demo for both PPRO and AE. But I was very dissapointed that when I do any adjustments in PPRO and then import PPRO timeline into AE, Colorista effect is transferred to AE effect control window, right to each clip where I aplied it but WITH ITS INITIAL VALUES. So all settings done in PPRO are gone and not transferred into AE properly.
Is it common behaviour of registered product or just demo do this? Or is there any workflow to mantain Colorista settings from PPRO when importing to AE? Because working with Colorista in Premiere is MUCH faster then in AE where I just can do some final tweaking. If this workflow will be possible we will definitely buy several copies of this great plugin.
Sorry for my poor English and thank you for any advice.
Jaromir Pesr
i/o post
Prague
Czech Republic
Hi Jaromir,
Yes, sadly that's an Adobe bug that we're working with them to fix so that Colorista settings in PPro can import properly into AE.
Stu, I am happy to hear this... Thank you very much for your quick answer. I am looking forward for that fix. Anyway, you (and the orphanage) are doing a great job. For all of us. I am always argue with your work when some of our clients do not believe that things should be done even other way then on overpriced machines at big rigid studios. Keep rebeling :-)...
Hi Stu,
according to my previous posts, do you think that announced new version of Colorista will keep effect settings when importing Premiere timeline into After Effects? I hope it'll work within CS3 as I mentioned above... Say YES, please... :-)
Jaromir
Hi Jaromir,
We've been working with Adobe and it's looking good for Colorista settings to migrate correctly from Premiere Pro CS3 to AECS3. Stay tuned!
In the meantime you may have noticed that the new version of Automatic Duck that was being shown at NAB was able to bring Colorista settings from FCP into AE7.
Colorista looks fantastic and I can't wait to get my hands on it. I do have a question though. I was trying to decide whether to buy for AE or Avid when I noticed that you said, "One seat of Colorista licenses you to use the plug-in in every one of the host applications." Am I correct in understanding this to mean that if I buy Colorista for one app I will actually recieve plugins for all supported apps? Thanks.
That's correct Dixon. Although you may have separate downloads for each host app, the same serial number will license any of them.
A minor quibble with your post: The ASC CDL is based around pedestal, gamma, and gain. Or as they call them, offset, power, and slope.
The choice of pedestal instead of lift was of some debate, but the decision was made because pedestal was supported in a standard way across all manufacturers, whereas there were several proprietary versions of "lift," some with a smoothing curve applied in the blacks.
As I said, minor.
Minor yes, but something we tested and considered well for Colorista. We use "lift," where the definition of lift is scaling the image about pure white, whereas "pedestal" or "offset" is a pure add/subtract.
The handy thing is that either system can duplicate the results of the other. Increasing Colorista's "lift" is the same things as increasing a Da Vinci's pedestal while simultaneously bringing down gain.
We chose lift because it feels more intuitive, especially in a system like Colorista where moving two controls at once is sadly not possible.
We deviated from the strict CDL in other ways to achieve more usability, but CDL values can be used to describe Colorista's Lift/Gamma/Gain adjustments.