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Slugline. Simple, elegant screenwriting.
Red Giant Color Suite, with Magic Bullet Looks 2.5 and Colorista II
Sunday, February 4, 2007 at 6:30PM 
I finally put together a little side-by-side demo showing the struggles I used to face with the 3-way color corrector in Final Cut Pro HD that, in part, led me to create Colorista.
Reader Comments (15)
I hate to say it Stu but you're not really being fair to the 3-way in your demo. For starters, it's a good thing shifting the colour bias doesn't change the overall luminance of the image. And you could easily darken the blacks down with the slider.
Isn't the luma ring in colorista just a repackaging of the slider anyway? I'm sure colorista IS more feature laden but perhaps it would have been truer to show the TIME difference it would take to get the same effect?
Cheers,
Toby
Toby, at the end of the movie I try to push the backs down using the Shadow Luma slider, but what happens is the shadow detail blocks up without actually pushing the floor down to true black. It's this very frustration that made me think an FCP version of Colorista might be a good thing.
The leftmost luma ring in Colorista is a master RGB lift control. The shadow luma slider in the 3-way pushes luminance down in the shadow range.
I'd love to be proven wrong if you'd like to have a go!
Oh, and as for "it's a good thing shifting the colour bias doesn't change the overall luminance of the image," I agree—in Colorista, overall color bias is done using the Gain wheel (on the right), and it leaves the luminance largely unchanged.
Ah! So you do. Apologies, I got distracted for the exact length of time that you show this in the vid.
As for proving you wrong, I'll just say that you COULD achieve the same effect by stacking 3-ways on top of each other which is what I've been doing quite a lot lately, but yours is more elegant so it would still prove your point.
Cheers,
Toby
No worries Toby—believe me, I've spent my share of time trying to get good results from the 3-way. Usually I wound up giving up and reaching for the RGB Balance effect. It can produce results much more like Colorista's but without the speed and ease of the color wheel UI.
Colorista doesn't seem to work in FCP with some of the popular hardware systems out there, specifically in our case the Kona2 - or we would be happily using it now on a project instead of the 3-way. Hopefully this will change in the near future - I find the controls much more intuitive and have really liked the results on dvcproHD stuff.
It seems that applying Colorista causes the bottom of the blacks to "clip" (not sure what the right term is) as well , and that the bezier workaround would cause this to be compounded when "protecting" the whites.
Gerry
Gerry, it's true that Colorista causes anything _below_ black to clip. If you have important image values down below 0% Y, bring them back up by reducing Contrast in B&C. You'll probably need to do a little back and forth with the Brightness and Contrast sliders to find the right values that tuck everything neatly between 0–100%.
great-didn't think of that. I'm migrating over to doing this in AE soon in any case and totally dig the RG.
thanks!
Gerry
I tried running the AE demo, it just crashed the app. MacPro 10.4 AE7
Please contact Red Giant about that anonymous—works fine for me in AE7 on my MacBook Pro, although of course both Colorista and AE are running under Rosetta in that case.
http://www.postmagazine.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=63930E9D02644EC9A127AF67602DA756&nm=E-Newsletters&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&AudID=FF037C4DE3A14C94AAECFC023E642B26&tier=4&id=30979A12C11F4DC68D1D816A7F0B997B%20
check that out towards bottom talking about Colorista
Jim
I like the simplicity of the "lift, gamma, gain," concept, but I just don't think it's enough. I color corrected an hour of documentary TV with this method, and promptly got replaced with a ringer because the results weren't satisfactory.
Thankfully I was given a second chance and went back to using curves. I find that curves give me precise control over my black point and white point, whereas lift and gain only get me roughly where I want to be. And curves offer infinitely finer control over a range of midtones. I usually have three or four nodes between the top and bottom, which allows me to bring out a lot of subtlety.
Maybe it's just the platform I'm on (Symphony Nitris), but I don't see how I could get the results I want with just those three controls.
I am also a huge fan of curves. Stu's idea of doing your online in AE is great but I am more of a shake fan. I do all my colour correction in float space inside Shake and prefer to use the colour LUT curves.
Just recently we have been testing the colorista plugin in FCP in the film dept at UT in Austin. First impressions are that I like it. Its fast and is also an easy way to colour correct in FCP.
My question is...
why dont people make more colour correction tools with curves? Is it just me or are curves a lot more accurate?
cheers
samuel jorgensen
Curves certainly offer quite a bit of control. I wonder how long it would take to grade an entire movie with curves though? Lift/Gamma/Gain is regarded as plenty control for film grading, good enough for just about every film in theaters now. Many features are graded in about a week, which is roughly a reel per day. Lift/Gamma/Gain, mapped to those ubiquitous trackballs, allows a colorist to blaze through corrections without taking their eyes of the image.
But the thing about Colorista is that you don't have to use it all by itself! You can use it along with Hue/Sat and Curves in AE, Color Finesse or Conduit in FCP; and the combined effect is all the power when you need it, and/or speed and ease when you need that.
In other words, I'm not trying to suggest that any ways of working that people currently dig are wrong or bad -- just providing a new tool for the toolbox.
With curves I can get through 20-30 minutes of TV a day depending on how quickly it's cut, so I could imagine doing a feature in a week. Though, I can see how lift/gamma/gain would get you close, quickly.
The thing that slows me down the most is the shitty mouse control in Avid. I really like how colorista slows down the mouse so big movements make small changes.