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)
El, contact RGS support. That's just weird.
Will do. Thanks
I am very very tempted for colorista 2
how does this compare to apple color?
One point also does it take long to render , or is the adjustments realtime like final cut's 3 color wheel?
This is great, Colorista has always been my favourite coloring tool!
I'll take that as a yes ;-)
Above comment is response to your observation...
"Not only is it OK, it's Super Awesome."
Yeah. I use Colorista for Colorcorrection and Grading and Looks for the , well, Look I add to the Footage. And it works without Problems. at all. It's a really great Combo.
So, I love the new Colorista, but i'm also a photographer and i've been lusting for Colorista in Photoshop or if you could pull it off Lightroom / Aperture... for a long time... The interface is so much more streamlined & intuitive than levels and curves...
BTW is there a simple / quick workflow to edit images in AE?
Hey Jer, thanks for the bug catch! RGS was able to repro and will fix it in a future update.
Mark, I've been begging Adobe to allow non-destructive 3rd party filters in Lightroom.
Good! I was worried my system was falling apart :)
So um...yeah I heard the reward for a bug catch was particular 2 :-P
Stu, with this tutorial and a trial demo you just sold me colorista 2.
I'm reading the manual and i found 2 mistakes you would probably like to know about. On the page header (in the top of the browser / tab) it says "Magic bullet looks 1.0 help" and in Primary Stage > Exposure & Density the Density 1 and -1 example images are reversed (or at least to my understanding of how it works)
Here's a screenshot.
Great catches, thanks Mark!
Any chance of getting Sony Vegas Pro support aswell? Red Giant seems to be leaving vegas behind now, not supporting vegas 64bit with MBL for example.
Cheers
Anton
Hi Stu, Sorry to be a party pooper but I'm testing the demo version in FCP 7.0.2 using Prores HQ media, just applying the Colorista II with all the settings on default, is inducing a serious loss of resolution and also inflicting some slight distortion to the image aswell. Is this an issue with the demo or does the actual software have this detrimental effect?
Stu- the tutorial video and the demo download have sold me on Colorista II. The killer feature for me is clarity/definition/pop - and the ability to quickly dial in negative clarity on skin tones with a key, copy the filter, invert the key and dal in positive clarity on everything else. Making a living filming pretty girls, they don't thank you for using positive clarity to make them look twenty years older.
Only thing I came across in my playing around is the same sort of issue Matthew found earlier in the thread- using the simple HSL controls in the primary to lighten skin tones, it might be useful to give a "width" control for the definition of colours, particularly skin tone orange, as for a lot of the footage I've played with so far (HVX200 and 5Dii/7D) the orange is nearly but not quite right to grab all the skin tones reliably. If I could just make it a little wider, I might be able to avoid keying quite a few shots.
I don't know if it is feasible or indeed desirable to do for all the colours, but skin tones are so important that it might be worth adding a control specifically to allow a broader definition of orange, to more reliably be able to cover the skin tones in one go?
... and what looks like a bug to report too. In FCP 6.0.6 OSX 10.6.3. When making changes on the colour wheels, undo doesn't work as I'd expect.
For example, starting from highlights at default, click on an extreme blue. Then undo (either with CMD-Z or menu option). Instead of immediately going back to the centred position, the wheel jumps halfway to Cyan instead. Another undo and it jumps to full cyan. Only on the third undo does it return to the centre. It does this on primary, secondary and master colour wheels.
Worst, on the primary/master HSL wheels undo doesn't seem to do anything at all.
Hi Stu,
Seems like you just sold me on adding Colorista to my arsenal of CC plugins.
With regards to your attempt in the video to isolate/change the color of the News stand box, wouldn't it be a better idea to use the Rotobrush feature in AE CS5, copy the area to a new layer and apply Colorista to this layer? That would give you the opportunity to change it to any color you'd like.
Also, and I believe Tom asked the question as well, does Colorista support or are you planning to support external CC controllers such Tangent Waves or JL Cooper?
I just loaded the trial plugin for this - my only concern is the render times. With Ppro CS5, quad core 3ghz, 8gig ram and an nvidia gtx 460 a 30 second clip still takes 4 minutes to render? Using the Mercury playback engine and stacking on similar GPU color effects the render time for the same 30 second clip is only 1:20.
It appears colorista is not using the GPU to render at all?
Is there a way to zoom in on the matte in the Secondary Keyer if you dont have a mouse with a wheel, for example, I am using a wacom and keyboard? Great job by the way!
Hey Richard.
That would work. But the shown thing by Stu works in FCP too. So maybe thats the Idea behind doing it that way?
@GPSchnyder: If I have judged it correctly, Stu was actually already working inside AE for this tutorial... ;-)
Yeah, I know. But showing of Stuff that doesn't work everywhere the Plug-in works is not the best Idea for a video that does give you an Idea what the Plug-in can do. :)
Hywel: Thanks, we'll look into that.
Richard: I love the rotobrush and see it as a real boon to color grading in AE, but in this case the key is much faster.
AlexL: That's very strange. Never seen anything like that. Wish I could see what you're seeing.
Peter: Sadly, third parties do not get direct access to the Mercury engine. We do render on the GPU, but we have to be handed the pixels first, and the host forces us through a software bottleneck there.
Love it. And Manual is very clear and accessible.
Still having a hard time completely wrapping my head around the use of density vs, exposure. I understand the example given in the manual, but can you share a thought or additional scenario where you are working density in the Primary Room as a preparation for a later adjustment?
Gorgeous!
Going to try out the demo soon. Hopefully I can get this running at work. Im slowly getting very frustrated with Color.
The UI looks amazing and very well thought out.
After extensive working with Colorista 2 for a couple of days this is my thought. Its a "horses for courses" situation.
Color has much more power (i.e. Color EFX room nodes, hue and saturation point control, auto and manual tracking, the new ability to update the time line,etc). If I need the options it provides me three is no substitute.
If a project needs a quick work flow or basic color correction then Colorista 2 is a very good choice.
After thought... I also really like the ability to create your own user shapes in Color.
Stu - Was wondering if it's possible to include an "Add filter to next clip/2nd clip forward" feature like the FCP 3-way Colour Corrector does.
Also i'm guessing it's a SDK limitation to resize the colour wheels but how about including three presets for size such as sml/med/lrg.
BTW just discovered MBLooks, my clients love it!
@ Tom Diagon. Thanks for comparison info - it is helpful. If you used the looks suite in conjunction to CII does it make a good substitute for the color effects / nodes room? Am going to download and test it today if I get a couple of spare hours.
Mary Shapiro : Yes I tried stacking Looks on top of Colorista and it is a viable combination. But the lack of tracking, the ability to draw your own shapes and no hue / saturation curves can still be an issue for certain projects. Again, for speed and better control than Colorista 1, I think Colorista 2 is a valid tool.
I would encourage folks new to Color Correction to take the Color 1.5 course on Lynda.com to learn the program since its included free with FCP Studio 3 and teaches techniques that are crucial to know. Then, if you want a different faster approach Colorista 2 makes sense to demo and explore.
Stu, I have a question regarding Colorista II and Linear workflow. If I work in 32bpc linear and then in a new comp use the color profile converter to convert my footage into Video space, everything seems to be working fine. Until I try to use the keyer. The image is very dark, and it does't look like it's reading the lin2vid conversion. Is there a workaround to this? Could you apply a srgb preview lut in the keyer window somehow?
Ray if you use an adjustment layer with colorista in after effects you can use bezier masks. hope this helps. This was a question I asked Stu in version 1 and that was his answer to me.
Simon, the Keyer sees the layer source pixels before any effects, so you'll need to precompose your lin2vid effect.
I´m fascinated by the chinese guy carrying the colorista prototype controller. I hope u can release it asap but try to make it a bit smaller.
Other than that....great update! It´s really an awesome and powerfull plugin. Colorista now is a MUST.
Mr Stu, does Colorista II works with sony vegas ? I am accustomed to editing with sony vegas and i have tried switching many times to premier and fcp, but it it seems that I just prefer the work flow of Sony Vegas.
I know that it must be very hard for you to support sony vegas because not many professionals use sony vegas, but i just wanted to let you know that there are a small number of people who would love to use colorista II in sony vegas :)
I just tried to send Adobe a feature request that they give you access to handles such that PPRO version would work better.......
Put in all data.... and it was rejected because it didn't believe my email address!!!
I'm VERY INTERESTED in your PPRO Version!!! Very Interested!!!
Hey Stu,
thanks a lot for the interesting post and video to the new Colorista.
I'm just starting to get into all this color correction and now you got MB Looks and MB Colorista and MB Mojo and I'm not really sure which program to get started with.
I know how the work and worked with all of them for the 30 day test period.
But I'm really not sure which one to buy. I really liked Looks a lot but Colorista seems to be a nice tool too.
So could you give me any advice on what program to go with in future?
Thanks a lot in advance,
Sebastian
AlexL: had a similar issue with the 3-waycolor corrector yesterday:
i had 1080p25 footage encoded in a 1080i50 ProResHQ quicktime (coming from nuke). if i applied a filter in a 1080p25 PR HQ timeline i got heavy stairstepping (basically only every second line rendered). the solution was to apply the filter in a 50i timeline, even thought the image content was progressive (but the file was encoded 50i).
could imagine you're seeing something similar.
hope it helps
++ chris
ditto on the vegas question, any love for our red-headed stepchild?
Stu - Loved the video - and Colorista 2 as presented - then i bought the software as I know Looks well - i thought this will be a snap I use it with Final Cut every day.....then after instal i discovered this great looking UI is for After Effects and unlike Looks there is no window as you show in the video and the User interface in FCP is very primitive, with no feedback as you demonstrated.
I can tell you love AE but for all of us filmmakers who didn't grow up with it and DID grow up with FC we likely added Motion for the integrated features - at least i did. I love the UI of Looks and assumed - my bad - thats what i was seeing.
I'm sure its easy to blame the good coders @ FCP but...
I get it now its my bad for not recognizing the AE interface but its really a different and lessor app in FCP. Red Giant nicely refunded me my purchase price.
Thanks,
Walker, I'm not sure what you're referring to—the UI in Final Cut is nearly identical to the one in AE. Have you watched the latest tutorial that shows Colorista II being used in Final Cut Pro? The screens look almost identical.
It is a bummer that Final Cut doesn't allow the wireframe overlays for the Power Masks, but that's about the only difference.
Man i would love to just be way off on this - on what i see in FCP vs. what i saw in your video demo...
...heres a pic of the differences i am trying to describe...http://dreamlikepictures.com/film/Colorista-2-on-FCP-.jpg
Thanks,
Walker.
Walker..the screen you are referring to IS present in both programs. It is the Secondary
Key EDIT screen. You might want to view Stu's tutorial so you can become more familiar with the program and how it works.
Hi Walker,
Like Tom said, the window you're seeing is the Keyer, and you access it with the Edit button in the Secondary stage.
Ok - thank you - i DO see the secondary Keyer now - from the Edit button - and i did watch both tutorials but Stu jumps right in and i did not see where he invokes the window. So thats great for the secondary key - but from my image
...http://dreamlikepictures.com/film/Colorista-2-on-FCP-.jpg....where Stu was scrubbing though the keyed effect - does THAT window exist in the FCP UI as well?
Thanks again,
Walker
Do you mean the After Effects timeline?
I dont know - i have never used After Effects - in the tutorial i saw Stu scrubbing through the results of his key in that window. But yes, After I bought it, and loaded it - i realized that must have been an AE window - when i incorrectly assumed that was a stand alone window similar to LOOKS as it appears in FCP.
- Walker
I'm noticing that Colorista's sliders are very difficult to drag. They are not very responsive to movements, and often will jump a little bit backwards after I've moved them in a certain direction. Is this normal? I'm using AE CS5.