Fix Your Zombie Problem in 10 Days with a Bullet
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 9:32PM 
Filmmaker and frequent co-host of This Week in Media John Flowers has posted a detailed article on his blog about color correcting and entire feature film in only ten days using Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks.
The film is Wasting Away, a zombie comedy that won the Audience Award for Best Film at ScreamFest (beating out 30 Days of Night). It was shot with the Viper camera, and Flowers finished the entire film in Final Cut Pro using the color correction tools I designed for Red Giant Software. As far as I know, this is the first feature film finished using Looks and Colorista, and I feel like a proud pappa.
Frequent readers of ProLost and The Guide will notice two things about the above: First, Flowers finished his film in his NLE, which is something I somewhat notoriously council against whenever I get a chance. Secondly, Flowers chose the Colorista/Looks solution over Apple's Color. I've gone on record stating that I admire Color's feature set and don't consider Colorista or Looks to be in direct competition with it. I've also stated repeatedly that Magic Bullet Looks in itself is not a color corrector—it is designed to create a look
on top of already corrected footage.
Often a company needs its customers to tell them what their product truly is. "Magic Bullet" started as a code name for a frame-rate conversion technology, but the independent filmmakers who couldn't live without it turned that codename into a brand. Users of a next-day package service called "Federal Express" informed the company of its true name: FedEx. Who really designed the user experience of Twitter, the developers or the user community?
So if you read Flowers's excellent article and see his screenshots and ask yourself, "Is Stu listening? Does he realize that filmmakers want powerful and easy-to-use color correction tools that turn their NLE into a proper finishing tool? And that they're already using Magic Bullet for this, despite his intentions?"
Well rest assured, the answer is yes.
Reader Comments (11)
Stu, you prefer to avoid finishing in the NLE, but what about if you use a codec like ProRes? I started using ProRes this week and am impressed by the quality and ability to push the footage in FCP.
Cheaper/more accesssible grading tools=less "big iron" thinking, or: the big iron folks have to adapt to desktop based customers, not favourable of arcane workflows.
What am i saying?
Probably that some parts of the industry will come out winners. I predict that the winner(s) will be the one that has:
- an open system (source from QT, DPX, EXR, R3D, P2, etc)
- a GUI that can run on a desktop system, with/without hardware using local storage (intelligent proxy handling) and GPU/CPU for rendering, albeit slower.
- hardware that does not need an engineer on the payroll
- storage system that can be utilized in a shared environment
- Tactile controller (Midi over USB where you assign the functions to each knob/button/slider/roller yourself, and can share presets for grading/editing/sound design etc).
my .2 euros
The biggest problem I have with finishing in Final Cut Pro is the lack of a good way to create masks for secondaries. There are ways, but nothing that even comes close to the precision that you can get with After Effects, or a dedicated finishing tool.
why not go for an affordable app that is shake-fcp-color all in one
we actually finished a film called Fear House in FCP with MBLooks and a touch of Color back in december of 2007. so maybe we're the first? :) we gave footage to Red Giant for their Reel.
Either way whether its recommended or not sometimes you only have the tools at hand and let me tell you those are some sweet shiny stainless steel knives you've made available for us!
Having played with Colorista and Magic Bullet, I still use Color to do my color correction.
I don't recommend it for people who aren't steeped in all of Color's many problems, but still a proper color correcting interface is invaluable. Also the very fast graphics card based feedback is also invaluable.
Also, it does a good job with ProRes.
Colorista is definitely miles ahead of the FCP 3-way, but I'm still left wanting vignettes/power windows which can track at the touch of a button.
However, not everyone is willing to tread the very murky waters and hair pulling nightmare experience that is finishing your first few features in Color (or Final Touch at the time).
The grading itself is easy, the getting in and out of color, not so much.
That said for most DIY finishing/smaller projects, especially those with lots of speed effects, they simply don't have the extra day to prep the project for color, and they don't need so many masks and power windows.
For what it is worth I find finishing work in an NLE a potential time waster. The temptation to correct shots before the edit is finished is overwhelming and it is not unusual to spend hours worrying about the look of the piece instead of the piece itself. Once the cut is locked I am happy to send it to AE and start phase 2 of the project.
Bert
Good point about the secondaries Paul, hadn't even thought of that.
Why do you think all us beta testers begged to be able to scroll through the footage while in looks?
And besides Looks has all those cool gradients, spot exposure, spot blur, tilt-blur-thingy. All those tools I constantly use on single shots.
Great stuff stu.
Our feature http://www.bullthemovie.com" REL="nofollow">Bull was also posted last year, and the Magic Bullet tools played a major role (although color work was done in After Effects, not the NLE, and that stage of post was considerably longer than 10 days).
The production journal on the website goes into some detail about the color grading process, but for relevance here:
What was done was sort of as Stu describes (if I follow correctly). Generally speaking, Colorista was used for basic color correction, and an overall Look was applied to a series of shots, often via an adjustment layer. That way it was possible to create consistent reference looks that could then be tweaked as necessary.
In between, there were also many, many layers of masks and secondaries, additional filters, custom plugins, and other visual finishing tweaks. Given the complexity of some of the shots, it would've been well-nigh impossible to attempt in any NLE.
(Of course it ain't all perfect. Who knew how much it was possible to hate an innocent little progress bar? A Lustre suite is realtime, and the sofa is way, way more comfortable.)
I've been using Magic Bullet in a lot of my grading work for years - always tweaking its settings shot by shot.
Typically I'd use curves, secondaries, and then MB Looks Suite. With the new UI on MB Looks I'm forced into the separate UI which really doesn't work when tweaking the look shot by shot. For a while I stuck with AE 7.0 and MB 2.0 for pure grading work but with the 'Magnum edit detector script' I need CS3 - which doesn't support previous versions of MB.
I'd love to see parameters exposed in the Effects Control Window for quick direct adjustments. For complex shots I'll often grade in layers, keying out highlights for separate treatment. I can't be in a separate window for that. Same reason Color Finesse doesn't work for me.
So in many ways the new UI is a big step back for me in terms of accessibility and 'directness'. So "how hard would it be...".
Bar3nd