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)
Hm, that's a known problem in Premiere, but not AE. They should be silky smooth in AE. You do have to watch the brightness sliders in the 3-way — they can seem squirelly if you change mouse directions in mid-drag.
One thing you might be noticing is that the controls are dampened, to allow for finer control.
Or maybe you're using a stylus?
Hi Stu,
just tested C II, and I love it so much, I want to introduce it as new grading tool in our company.
The only problem is the realtime capability with an external Monitor. Don´t get me wrong, inside AE (via open GL) I could even do realtime editing with RED 4k Footage - which is impressive! But our Blackmagic cards won´t show this on the external Controll monitors, they only show the ram-render.
I wonder if there is chance to fix this, because in apple color (which uses open GL also, I guess) it works with our Blackmagic stuff.
Is this an AE problem in general or do you think there is a workaround?
Frank, I'm sorry but I don't understand the problem. Are you saying that the Blackmagic output is not updating to reflect your interactive changes in AE?
Hi Stu,
if I set my AE Timeline to Open GL Preview, I can watch the colorista 2 edits in realtime, without doing a ram-preview. I hit play, and the whole graded clip is running in realtime without any rendering - which is great! Unluckily this OpenGL previews are not reflected by the Blackmagic output. On the other side apple Color reflects on the Blackmagic, and its using also Open GL.
Why won´t AE refect the Open GL Render on the Blackmagic? Is this an AE problem in general or do you think there is a workaround for Colorist 2?
Aha, I get it — thanks for clarifying. I think that's an AE/Blackmagic limitation, but I'll look into it.
Frank & Stu:
I just did a test using 1080i footage in an AE comp with Colorista 2 applied to it. I am running the newest AJA Kona 3 drivers (8) thru a Panasonic 26" HD engineering monitor. There is no problem with displaying the output of the comp. Just a point of comparison for you to consider.
Hi Tom,
did you activate "Open GL always on" inside AE? Thats my Problem. I guess you did a standard Ram preview in AE, which works fine for me too. But I want to use the Realtime features of OpenGL with the BM Card...
Yes, I had "Open GL always on" activated. I was manipulating and viewing in real time.
HI Stu,
could you find a solution for the Blackmagic/Open GL Problem inside AE?
Hi Frank, unfortunately, as you suspected, it's an AE thing. They don't blast out to 3rd party cards during OpenGL playback.
Sorry, but this is contradictory: Stu says that is a limitation of AE (3rd party cards), but Tom said that the OpenGL preview works with Aja Kona 3 (I guess on Mac), who is wrong?
Hm, I guess I should test more hardware configurations before I give such a definitive answer.
@Tom: Thanks for Testing with the AjA
@ Manuel: Thanks for pointing that out ;)
@Stu: Would be great If you could find out something about the Blackmagic issue. This AE/Open GL problem is the only reason my boss wants to rely on apple color, rather than Colorista 2...
I asked for a new feature request to Adobe:
"A special timeline only for import EDL, with only three layers, for video A, B and a transition layer between both, and also perhaps several adjustment layers above, for professional color grading with effects as Colorista 2, for example. After Effects is more suitable for color grading than Premiere for its color management, precise control (masks, tracker, etc) and OpenGL realtime playback. Grading in the current timeline is possible with only 10-20 layers, but with +100 layer es very dificult, almost impossible.
Also will be interesting the full screen mode playback as Premiere on desktop second monitor, for video preview."
Do you think this is a good idea?
Absolutely.
Hi Stu,
are there any News on the Blackmagic realtime OpenGL issue? If this is the wrong place to ask, please tell me what would be better...
Cheers,
Frank
Hey Stu,
I've just been using colorista II and the UI on the color wheels in after effects cs5 is dog slow...it's fine in FCP, havent tried it in premiere.
My after effects setup is using linear workspace rec709 and im importing 1920x1080 proreshq files. I'm getting lovely results but goddamn ts slow!! Any ideas on what I could be doing wrong? I'm using a wacom tablet but it's no better with mouse.
my hardware profile is :
Hardware Overview:
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro2,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 3 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 8
L2 Cache (per processor): 8 MB
Memory: 9 GB
Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz
any ideas would be much appreciated as the tool is great but the UI!!!!
Hi Roopinder, I'm guessing that maybe you have your effects panel undocked? Dock it back and the UI should clear up. This is a known issue that RGS is tracking.
ok stu - that didn't seem to clear it up. Could it be something to do with memory settings in my prefs? I'll double check those.
Otherwise if you have any further update on this I would really appreciate a heads up. I'm loving using it in FCP, it would be the icing on the cake to use it in After Effects - efficiently.
stu i had render multiple frames...after unchecking its being much more interactive.
- Footage displayed too dark in Colorista II keyer -
Hi, I have the same problem as Simon, however, the answer does not apply in my case. The problem is: When I enable color management in After Effects and also enable "Linearize Working Space", the keyer of Colorista II always displays the footage way too dark. I do not have applied any effects or filters, so precomping has not effect on the keyer. What is the workflow for Colorista II (and its keyer) within a linear working space?
Regards, Andreas
Andreas, by putting your project in a linear color space, you are converting your pixel values from video to linear, which is the darkening that you see. Colorista II is not designed to work in linear color space.
Stu, thanks a lot for the clear statement. And sorry, I once more got tricked by the "Use Display Color Management" option under "view". Thus, I did not realize that the shot darkened overall, i.e. also 'ouside' Colorista II. If I understood correctly a reasonable way to work would be to enable color management e.g. by setting the working space to sRGB for web video. Then to use 16bit precision and 'blend colors using 1.0 gamma'. This way Colorista II should work, too. However, I am not sure about the said 'display color management'. It desaturates the look in the viewer to an extend that I fear to get the colors wrong in the end.
Regards, Andreas
The setup you describe will allow you to get linear-light blending for layer operations, but still maintain video-space pixels for effects such as Colorista II.
It will also color manage your project. The desaturated view you see is the difference between just blasting the pixels to the screen and correcting them for an sRGB assumption. The accuracy will depend on how your monitor is calibrated and profiled, and the validity of the source profiles for your footage.
If you don't trust the display color management, you can turn it off. You can also use the Blend Colors Using 1.0 Gamma option without specifying an ICC color space for your project.
Again, thank you very much for your explanation Stu. Just for background information: My Monitor is a Fujitsu P27T-6 IPS set to "Office" mode (others being D-Mode, Photo, Video), the color mode is set to "native" (others being sRGB, 6500K, 7500K, 9300K, Adobe RGB, Custom Color). Calibration was done with a Spyder3 Elite. Motivation behind was a forum discussion with Todd Kopriva on the AE forum where he told me to set the monitor to its widest gamut before calibrating it, and then use a working space in AE with a gamut that does comprise that of all used footage. We did not discuss "display color management", though.
Thanks and regards, Andreas