Color My Impression
Saturday, April 21, 2007 at 3:15PM 
Back in October, Apple bought Silicon Color, a small company with a line of products branded FinalTouch. Ranging from a $1000 standard-def solution all the way up to a $25,000 2K system, FinalTouch was a color grading solution composed of software written for the latest breed of Apple’s tower workstations. FinalTouch on a sweet Mac with some add-ons was intended to be competitive with grading stations costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But reports from users were that the systems were anything but real-time, and had some reliability issues that ranged from inconvenient to catastrophic. Still, FinalTouch had (and still has) a devoted and active user base, and earned a reputation of aggressively supporting its customers through these technical glitches.
I, like most people, was excited to see Apple buy FinalTouch. Firstly, I expected the product to become vastly cheaper as a result, enough so that I could get me some without needing to base a business around it. I also expected Apple to bolster the feature-rich product with some much-needed quality assurance engineering.
But as Shake users know better than anyone (expect maybe Rayz users), Apple buying your bread-and-butter can be a mixed blessing. When you buy expensive software from small companies, you effectively become best friends with the development team. You know them by first names and you send them holiday cards. You have a folder full of emails from and to them. Apple, however, mistakenly applies the same strategy of black-box secrecy that works so well for iPods and iPhones to its Pro Apps division as well, cutting off developers from users and vise versa. I have struggled with this enough that my company, The Orphanage, no longer has any special relationship with Apple. It’s just too much of a one-way street. I can’t buy my bread-and-butter tools from someone who can’t conduct an open conversation with me (under NDA of course) about the future of the product.
Nevertheless, I remained excited that Apple was taking over FinalTouch and was hoping that NAB would see the announcement of it’s new incarnation. I was not disappointed. Not only was Color saved for the gracenote of Apple’s Sunday launch event, but it was given proper respect as representing an aspect of film production as important as music and sound. And then Rob Schoeben announced the price: free. It ships in the box with Final Cut Studio 2.
Strangely, this pissed some people off. To understand why, you need to look back to the release of Final Cut Pro, and in fact, to the Mac itself. The Mac, as you will recall, turned everyone into a designer. We endured some truly abysmal church event flyers, and print professionals had to remind their customers that it was their skill and taste that made them worth hiring, not their unique access to proportional fonts. Apple’s Final Cut did the same, lending the world the momentary notion that anyone could be an editor. And again, with time, people realized that it wasn’t the $100,000 investment in an Avid that made you an editor, it was skill, training, and experience.
Colorists have transitionally been a lot like Flame artists—they drive a powerful, expensive, and rare beast, and drive it with skill, speed and unique good taste. I’ve been known to spend more than a grand (of other peoples’ money) for an hour of time with an A-list colorist. Sure, I expect his Da Vinci to run fast and intuitively and grade my shots in HD in real time without a hiccup, but mostly I expect him to live up to his personal reputation for making my footage more than the sum of its parts. When you see these top dudes do their thing it gives you a palpable respect for the power of color. My opportunities to work with these artists have been a huge inspiration to my designs for Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks.
To get to that point, or near it, colorists needed access to the pricey and rare color stations like the Da Vinci. As expensive as it is to own one, it’s twice as expensive to let someone putz around on one when you could be booking a client in that room. So today’s colorists wield skills that are hard-earned and fought-for. They got where they are by unglamorously running tape decks and sneaking in time on the knobs whenever they could. Or, as entrepreneurs, they got where they are with considerable financial investment in a system of their own.
So like Avid editors of only a handful of years ago, colorists are now staring down the barrel of a world full of Final Cut Studio users who may suddenly fancy themselves colorists in their own right. And to them I say, don’t worry. Here’s why.
First, the obvious. They aren’t going to be any good. Color work is hard. The accessibility of violins has not tarnished the reputations of the Paganinis of the world.
Color correcting one shot is fun. Color correcting a dozen shots to look both lovely and consistent is hard work. Even people willing to commit to that work will run up against a phenomenon called metamerism. Without going into too much detail, I’ll suffice it to say that the more color work you do on a shot, the harder it is to stay good at it. Like Riggs in Lethal Weapon, you get too close to the case and loose all objectivity.
Even with Apple’s best efforts at integrating Color into FCP, there’s still a big speed bump between one’s editorial process and Color’s daunting interface. Editors who have trained themselves in enough color work to get by within FCP (possibly using Colorista!) may be perfectly happy with their workflow.
Did I mention that Color’s interface is daunting? Color isn’t Mac-like. When you click over to the Secondaries tab and start working on a secondary correction, nothing happens. You have to manually enable that secondary. Similarly, when you create a mask or vignette for that secondary, it defaults to having no effect. You must manually “attach” it to the secondary. Little gotchas and usability failures lurk behind every corner of this odd app that at a distance looks sexy as hell with its three-dimensional vectorscope, but up close lacks even the common courtesy of an anti-aliased font.
Maybe the single most important thing for people to understand is that color grading is not onlining. Look at the feature set of Smoke. Onlining is color correction plus a million other things, things you can do very effectively in either Final Cut Pro or After Effects or some combination thereof. For some, a fluid environment in which to meticulously hone only the color aspects of a project will be well worth the workflow hurdles. For many it will not. Some of Colorista’s biggest fans are also paid-in-full Final Touch customers. It’s hard for some editors to give up the easy and pervasive access to all their titling, effects, edits, sound and their color that they’ve been enjoying live in Final Cut. A good analogy is dedicated audio mixing software. I know a hundred FCP users who have never opened Soundtrack Pro.
A couple more safety tips: Color likes the latest Mac hardware with dual displays, won’t run on a laptop (at least not my 15” MacBook Pro), and really isn’t any fun without some expensive external hardware from JL Cooper or Tangent Devices.
And lastly, Color has a dirty little secret. To reveal it, one simply needed to walk up to one of the (presumably fully-pimped) Color demonstration stations at NAB and do something that you didn’t see in any of the on-stage demos: Press play. Color, when doing the kind of stuff that makes it worth using, is not real-time. Which, of course, is totally OK—but what’s not OK is that Color doesn’t render any sort of interactive preview that you can view in the context of a session. To see your work play back smoothly, you must batch render and view the results in Final Cut! There’s no concept of rendering an interactive preview to Color’s own timeline. Color should work just like Final Cut itself, with a bar above the timeline that shows what parts are rendered and available for real-time playback, and which parts have been edited and are therefore in need of a render. Rather than force me to hit render, Color should speculatively render recently edited shots in the background during periods of user inactivity.
I patiently explained all this to the nice former Silicon Color employee at the Apple booth and he actually told me that colorists don’t want this feature. I think maybe his newly-issued black mock turtleneck was cutting off his air supply a little. Trust me dude, they may not know they want it, but they want it. But as much as they latently want it, FCP editors, the new predominant user base of Color, will expect it. And clients will of course demand it.
Am I dissing Color? Quite the opposite. It’s a powerhouse, and an important development for video professionals and DV Rebel filmmakers. Apple has put a (slow) Da Vinci in your living room. Are you going to use it? I think for most folks the answer will be a definite “maybe.” But with a few more features, and a more dynamic link-up between FCP and Motion, Color could become the single most exciting thing for filmmakers since Final Cut itself. If only Apple can find a way to stay connected with the people using it.
Reader Comments (59)
Oh, sorry, one more thing—the eight cores won't help much since all rendering is done in the GPU.
e I don't seem like Spammy Mcgee, but we are making our show Earth Defense with Stu's workflow in The Guide.
If anyone wants to watch it it is:
http://earthdefense.blogspot.com/
Stu, when you color correct in After Effects, how do you monitor the video levels? With external scopes? Are there software scopes hidden in After Effects that I can't find? Or do you get the general look you want in AE, then adjust for broadcast safe in Premiere Pro?
I am looking into doing primary color correcting in FCP with Colorista, then use Automatic Duck into getting the cut into AE to do the finishing touches, but since I cannot find any scopes I don't see how this is a viable option.
Re: Color real-time with DVI-out
Chris, that's some really good stuff about the inner workings of FT/Color. So now, with the advent of professional-grade LCD-monitors with LED-backlighting (JVC and Sony had several at NAB) you could connect one of those to your MacBook Pro 17", keep the controls on the laptop screen and the preview (with some scopes perhaps) on the external monitor, plug in a your Tangent or JLCooper-interface (btw, could someone please make an indie-affordable three-ball setup? Griffin? M-audio?) and grade away in 2k. On set. In real-time. Not too shabby at all.
How about supporting a three-screen setup with DVI on a Mac Pro, then? Could you use two graphics card, let's say two ATI X1900s, connect two Apple Displays to the first card for the UI and the other to the JVC LCD for preview?
(And here's hoping Color will support the new CDL-standard from ASC for color management.)
Swedish: Snygg reel. Kände igen texten från någonstans...
Stu:
You mentioned one thing about the new octal ocre machines that I thought was a little bit of a miss. You said, "Oh, sorry, one more thing—the eight cores won't help much since all rendering is done in the GPU."
This is true in theory but there's something that you're forgetting. For the most part your 8 cores are sitting idle while the GPU does all of the processing, so one possible implementation - something that several of the other manufacturers are doing - is setting those idle processors to rendering grades in cpu while the interactive session is taking place on the GPU. This is a little of what I was trying to explain before, about once you're happy with a grade just baking it in with a hot key and say 6 of the cores go on to render the shot "behind the scenes."
Of course your io will suffer while the cpus are pulling material that you're also currently working on, but if you're grading on a still picture, tweaking and making adjustments, and then hitting play, there's enough idle io time to be productive.
As I said earlier, this is something that Andy really wanted to do quite early on and just wasn't able to because the mac hardware just wasn't "large" enough then.
...och sen Oskar:
The way that I would do it for scopes would be via a DVI ramp to extract an HDSDI/SDI signal from the DVI output and pop in external scopes instead, in order to have them available say in FCP or what ever other softwares you might be using. The omintech ones are very nice and run waveform, vector, histo, picture and ppm on a single DVI Flat pannel meaning you get more than just video measurement. Then you can either loop the DVI signal to say a Cinetal monitor or the Martin's new Ecinema monitor or a to a Sony CRT (the monitor choices I like) alternaltively to a projector of some sort.
There are all kind of nice things that come about by moving your signal path to HDSDI in term of monitoring, measuring and integration into a facility type environment. The one main thing if you're working in a film enviroment would be the ability to run your log material through Filmlight's Truelight hardware for print emulation. While FinalTouch/Colour has the ability to load 3d luts, there's not really a working paradigm for Truelight as Filmlight likes to keep thier stuff on a tight leash.
As far as teaming up graphics boards for a three-up display layout, I actually don't know. My gut says it shouldn't work but it's one of those things that would almost have to be tried. That being said what could work very nicely if apple felt like doing it, would be soubling up on the graphics boards such that one was doing the interactive session work while the other was constantly rendering in GPU in the background down to disk. Wouldn't be so dumb.
och på svenska: Tack! Det är "The Outsider" fran DJ Shadow.
Best,
Chris
--
Chris Noellert
Senior Flame / Digital Post Technical Director / Prima donna
Nordiskfilm Post Production Stockholm
(Formerly Filmteknik/Frithiof Film to Video. AB)
Tulvaktsvagen 2
115 40 Stockholm
Tel: +46 8 450 450 00
Fax: +46 8 450 450 01
Dir: +46 8 450 450 17
Mob: +46 7 024 616 31
AIM: cmnoellert
Reel: http://se.nordiskfilm-postproduction.com/movieviewer.aspx?movie=Video_250018.mov
Web: http://www.nordiskfilm-postproduction.com
Chris, you may note that in the very post on which we are all commenting, my number one request for Apple is to add speculative background rendering.
I don't think it's fair to call my octo comment a "miss," since it was referring to the current state of the product. Folks looking for the best performance with Color are better off investing in GPU, not CPU.
Hi Stu,
I think I'm not so good at explaining myself on this one. What I'm saying is that from the v2 release there have been cpu based rendering facilities in FT and *very* basic render farm management. In theory, you can, on an Octal machine (or any other machine) use your own machine as a render node for final print, bringing down the investment cost rendering in cpu while interactively grading in GPU.
http://www.siliconcolor.com/Docs/FinalServer/FinalServerSetup.html
I didn't mean to sound condecending - I don't know how much FT code Apple is actually shipping with Color or the general level of awareness regarding what ft actually had before going Apple, so sorry if you took offense - it was my meaning.
Best,
Chris
--
Chris Noellert
Senior Flame / Digital Post Technical Director / Prima donna
Nordiskfilm Post Production Stockholm
(Formerly Filmteknik/Frithiof Film to Video. AB)
Tulvaktsvagen 2
115 40 Stockholm
Tel: +46 8 450 450 00
Fax: +46 8 450 450 01
Dir: +46 8 450 450 17
Mob: +46 7 024 616 31
AIM: cmnoellert
Reel: http://se.nordiskfilm-postproduction.com/movieviewer.aspx?movie=Video_250018.mov
Web: http://www.nordiskfilm-postproduction.com
Interesting! I had no idea. The impression I got on the NAB floor is that none of that is included with Color. The former Silicon Color guy was the one who told me that all rendering is in the GPU. I specifically mentioned the new octos when I asked about background rendering and that's when he told me that they wouldn't be of much use.
But as you can see, I'm just regurgitating what I heard and saw at the show, where it sounds like you have some actual experience and insider info on FT, so thanks indeed for your insights!
The distributed rendering feature has been removed from v1 of Color.