Getting Started with Colorista II
Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 11:13AM Getting Started with Magic Bullet Colorista II from Red Giant Software.
Colorista II is available now from Red Giant Software for Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro (see update below), and Adobe After Effects. It’s what I used to grade these before and after examples. It’s my new favorite thing, and i really hope you enjoy it.
Stu
If you’re considering Colorista II for use in Premiere Pro CS5, please download the demo first and try before you buy. Depending on your project resolution and graphics hardware, you may see some pretty amazing performance, thanks to Adobe’s realtime Mercury Engine. However, you may also find that mouse interaction with the “Custom UIs” (the 3-Way and HSL color wheel controls) is sluggish.
Both Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro bypass their own plug-in SDKs for their native 3-way color correctors. They use window configurations and graphics drawing routines that third-party developers don’t have access to. On some systems this can make UI interaction for third-party effects with Custom UIs slow. In the case of Premiere Pro, the slowness can be bad. Real bad.
Have you noticed that Premiere’s own 3-way color corrector has never been ported to After Effects? This is one consequence of the Premiere team’s choice not to use their own plug-in SDK. Another is that third parties cannot provide a fluid custom UI experience within Premiere Pro.
After Effects, on the other hand, “eats its own dog food,” and has no effects that don’t use the public SDK. This means that third parties can create excellent user experiences within After Effects. The benefits to us users are obvious — just look at all the amazing plug-ins available for After Effects.
Premiere Pro and After Effects actually share the same plug-in SDK. This is amazingly cool, because it means that, for example, you can start a project in Premiere, use Colorista II all you want, and then move the project to After Effects, keeping all your settings. But despite this shared architecture, plug-ins like Colorista II sing in After Effects and bog down in Premiere.
Red Giant has is committed to working with Adobe to resolve this situation. We love Premiere Pro and feel that it and Colorista were born for each other. The playback performance is amazing. We’ve done the best we can with what we have. If you try Colorista II in Premiere and find the performance lacking, please consider contacting Adobe and asking them to improve the performance of Custom UI plug-ins written to their own SDK.
Stu
There’s a new video tutorial up today on Red Giant’s site: Multi-shot Workflow in Final Cut Pro.
Reader Comments (125)
AWESOME!!
when will ya have something for Avid Mr.Stu
Love that simple way to lift the skin tones!
Jakob, As soon as their AVX plug-in architecture allows custom UIs like the 3-way and HSL controls. We'd love to support Avid but their plug-in SDK just doesn't support this kind of interface.
This really bums me out, as I love what Avid's been up to lately.
I was hoping for bezier masks for the Power Windows, even if that meant I had to render. This will be a great product as is, but it is no replacement for Color or DaVinci. But is also is no where near the price.
I will be upgrading my Colorista 1. Great Job guys!
Looks great. The tutorial really helps. Thanks, Stu.
Just clarifying: So the basic workflow remains the same, right?
Primary: balance out the entire image
Secondary: adjust specific areas of the image using masks, etc
Master: Apply a "look"
In the Rebel's guide, you suggest doing your secondaries before the primary.
Does all this still hold true?
Stu, looks great and love the overview video.
Can you give us a brief rundown on why Colorista II should be your choice over other tools like Apple Color? I'll get the ball rolling and say one idea I love is the ability to use the same color correction tool in all my various programs, FCP, AE, Fusion (via AE plugin. Hope that works!) etc.
But as far as toolset goes does it offer somethings that others do not? Or are we looking at an affordable solution for people that might not have FCP Studio etc.
Thanks!
thanks anyways brother, sad to hear its on avid side but whats new eheh
stu one thing i forgot to ask what kind of updates done to Magic Bullet Colorista 1.2 for avid ?
Jakob, It's just a compatibility upgrade. We include it with Colorista II for your older projects and for Avid folks.
Jeremy, my feeling is that as great as Color is, very few people use it. It's hard to learn, not very Apple-like, and requires you to break up your workflow. I wanted to provide all the power of Color or a DaVinci right in your editing timeline. You can use it a little or a lot, on one shot or on every shot, and you can do it while you're cutting, not after you're "done." Because are you really ever done editing?
Thanks Stu that was great. Please do more of these!
Great! Is Colorista II compatible for Adobe CS5/64bit ?
This looks like a phenomenal upgrade for version 2. Great work Stu.
Paul: Yes!
Dave: Many more of these tutorial videos are on their way!
Great work, Stu. Just was wondering from a technical standpoint: is pop actually a sharpener? Because in the video it looked like the edges started producing halos when you were cranking up the slider a little bit.
Jason: Everything you said is correct. And as long as you follow that workflow, you're still in line with what I stated in The Guide, even if we've changed terminology a bit.
Stu, I think you might have just sold me a copy of Colorista II. You totally nailed my exact frustrations with Color.
Rudi, Pop is a local contrast tool, which is kinda like a sharpening tool but it works over a bigger area. Like the Clarity tools in Lightroom and Aperture, if you turn it up too high, you can get that nasty HDR-tone-mapping halo effect. Use with discretion!
Does this version still require specific graphics cards to run? If it does, can you recommend anything that will run with an older card like the ATI Radeon 9200?
El, there's a CPU mode that anyone can use. Switch over if your GPU can't keep up.
This looks incredible. Well done. I can't wait to start using it.
Just did the tutorial for Colorista 2. Nice work. One question. When I activate the power window on the secondary the yellow outline for the mask is not visible . I can see its effect on the picture, but no yellow box or circle to help me size it. This os on FCP Studio 3 Mac.
Hi Tom, sadly, FCP does not allow us to draw those handy non-rendering overlays. This drives me crazy and we're always thinking about better ways to place Power Masks in FCP.
I see.Thats easy to work around. Thanks for the prompt response!
Looks great. i'm in the middle of CCing 4 projects in Color, so i definitely feel the "breakup of workflow" issue. my editors like to color correct in their edits, which can't be used in Color. i would CC in Final Cut on these particular edits if FCP's CC tools weren't so limited. so Colorista II looks appealing to me. one question, will Colorista II work with a panel like the Tangent Wave or Euphonix MC Color?
Lift, gamma and gain are gone?
When using the Primary HSL color dots on some test footage I noticed a bunch of sparlking/spotting on a bald person's head after I tweaked the orange to a slightly brighter color. You couldn't notice it in a still, but as he moved parts of his head would get more into the orange range and pick up the color correction(he had very light wisps of hair on his head that were changing the color as he walked/head moved ever so slightly). Is there anyway to control what color is considered orange (or any of the colors in the HSL section)? Or maybe someway to feather that color selection or control it's width? Or am I just missing something obvious?
Manuel: Yes, although the new 3-Way works very much like the old, we've changed some of the underlying code to produce more pleasing results.
Matthew: I'd love to see what you're experiencing so I could help you troubleshoot, but it is going to be possible to create noise using extreme HSL adjustments, given how noisy and compressed a lot of our footage is these days. The Keyer is there for you when you want to fine-tune and feather a secondary correction.
The noise is definitely there to start with, the footage is not very good (old SD res stock footage). The problem is more the HSL adjustment feature seems a bit narrow and skips pixels (due to noise in the footage maybe) which because of the boosting makes the noise more noticeable. It's there even without Colorista, but the correcting just makes it worse. I'm not sure it's a reasonable test but it did kind of surprise me when it looked great until I hit play.
WOW! That was phenomenal. I've only been using the semi-free DV Rebel scripts that came with the guide, and your tutorial just now definitely makes a pretty convincing case for upgrading.
My only question now is, if I'm still on CS4, am I missing out on some functionality here outside of the faster preview/render times in CS5?
Ok, this is a bit disappointing (I am a old school man), but if Colorista I is included, then I can to do a overall correction with him, and to use Colorista II for parcial corrections, if I don't get to used the new approach. Thanks Stu.
I don't know if i'm missing something or it's just my system - but the mouse does not slide on the controls at all - but since I'm the only one reporting this...i'm thinking it's my system...
Manuel, I don't think you're going to notice a huge difference. You should just be able to push midtones farther without getting crunchiness.
Art: Colorista II is fully supported on CS4.
Matthew: Like I say, I'd love to take a look at the footage. Put it somewhere online and use the contact form to tell me where I can download it.
Quick question. Where does MB Looks stands now. I mostly use Looks now, with Colorista II out out, I would not be surprised if Looks 2 came out. Besides the HSL sliders, why would you use Colorista II over Looks?
Thanks - JJ
Fixed:
I had to delete files in:
user->appdata --roaming - adobe - after effects - 10.0
And also the directory
DVADialogPrefs.
Restarted and now the sliders are sliding :)
JJ, the workflow I like is to use Colorista for shot-to-shot corrections and Looks over top of all my shots for a consistent look. But I know some folks stick entirely to one or the other. It comes down to individual choice.
Colorista II has a lot of power that Looks does not, for now! Looks has the advantage of a gorgeous UI that's fun and easy to use, but Colorista has the advantage of working in-context without taking over your screen.
Kind of Fixed:
Just figuered out the bug at least on my system - if you undock the effects windows - that's what breaks the sliders on the color wheels - Just fyi.
Thanks Jer, I'm not able to repro that on my Mac, but I'll have RGS test on WIndows.
Been playing with the demo for an hour, it's great fun to use, and feels like a more 'serious' colour too than Looks - the UI is ingenious.
By the way, one other difference between this and Looks is that you can keyframe Colorista. Whether you'd want to is another matter...
Good point ChrisC. You'll probably find yourself keyframing the heck out of those Power Masks.
Matthew, thanks for sending your footage. You have a classic case of a guy in your shot whose face is so pink that he's outside the range of orange. If you boost Red Lightness along with Orange Lightness you get a much cleaner shot, but I'd probably reach for the Keyer in this case.
Thanks for the swift reply =) I'm actually still using your Rebel DV Script that came free with the guide(do I need to say that it's a must read for everyone even thinking about making movies nowadays?). Do you guys have a student rebate? I'm really tempted, but I think paying my rent this month would be the wiser choice.
By the way without your guide I think I wouldn't have even made it to film class.
Thanks Stu. Now let's get the control surfaces going.
Yes I gave up on the HSL feature to give the faces a boost and did setup the Keyer for that job. I was pretty happy with what I ended up with. Though I'll admit now I'm worried every video on YouTube/Vimeo is going to have super-enhanced face lighting thanks to easy keying. Kind of like how for a while everything looked like a Magic Bullet Looks preset. Sometimes if you make a monster, it will eat you.
Rudi, Red Giant has an educational pricing program:
http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/store/buyers-guide/academic-pricing/
Hey thanks! I found the option to switch to CPU mode, but I'm still getting a black preview window. Any ideas?
"...I like is to use Colorista for shot-to-shot corrections and Looks over top of all my shots for a consistent look."
This sounds like a great combination. Is there any degradation or corruption of color values created by using Colorista 2 for the basics and Looks for the "Looks"
It seems in this work flow you are able to get a "Color FX" room kind of power that
Color has and Colorista does not.
My question above really asks if it is OK to stack Looks on top of Colorista, just in case I was not clear about that.
Not only is it OK, it's Super Awesome.