Color My Impression

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.

Magic Bullet Looks

For those who missed the demos at NAB, here's a little taste.

First things first—these are pre-alpha screenshots, so everything's subject to change.

When you apply the effect (in AE, PPro, FCP, Motion or Avid), you see this gray box in the host. It defaults to empty, but after you apply a look, the box shows you the "tool chain" of that look.

Click Edit and the LooksBuilder app launches. Beneath the image is the tool chain, which is processed left-to-right. It's actually a model of a camera, starting with the light that enters the lens and ending with post-production. More on that later.

Mouse over to the left and a drawer opens with thumbnails of the look presets. The thumbnails show your image, not a canned one—rendered in realtime. Pick from any of the presets, or view a slideshow of the presets in the Look Theater.

On the right is a drawer full of tools. You use these to build looks from scratch, or edit the presets. The tabs at the top of the drawer switch between the various categories (matte box, lens, camera, etc.).

The controls for the selected tool shows up in the right pane. Whenever possible, controls are in real-world units, like t-stops or filter grades. Below I'm using an Edge Softness tool to create an artificial shallow depth-of-field look.

When you drag tools out from the drawer, an image of a camera appears. Some tools, such as lens filters like Diffusion and Gradient, only operate in one category of the camera. Others, like Exposure, work anywhere in the chain. The camera diagram reminds you that you're building a simulation of how light travels through a camera and is modified by film stocks and post-processes such as Bleach Bypass (neg or print), custom film stocks, and color correction. Here I'm adding a Telecine Net tool to the Post category.

Of course you can save out your own look presets, but if you design some tool settings that you want to re-use or share, you can save those as well by simply giving the tool a name. Custom tools appear at the bottom of the tool drawer. Looks will ship with preset custom tools for common lens filter and film stocks.

Whichever host application you use, you work with the same interface and presets. And you don't even need a host application—you can launch LooksBuilder as a standalone app and load a still frame on which to develop a look. So you could design a look on set based on a grab from your Panavision Genesis camera, and hand that look file on down through the post process so that it can be used in the FCP edit and even in the final conform.

Looks is color-space agnostic, with input/output tools for video, Cineon scans, and Panavision's Genesis camera. More to come. This means you can design a look on an offline telecine transfer and then apply it later to scanned 35mm film!

All processing is floating point color, GPU accelerated. Since you can take video in and output log, you can actually prep video for a filmout all inside of Looks. By boosting the contrast in Looks you'll create overexposed areas that will map into the upper ranges of the filmout, eliminating that flatenened-out highlight look that many video-to-film transfers have.

Once you've placed your tools in the chain you can hit a key and enter "trackball mode," which allows users of trackballs or laptop trackpads to edit tool controls in an almost control-surface type of way. The keyboard navigates you from one control to the next and the trackball edits the values. Not quite the same thing as using a JL Cooper rig, but costs a ton less.

My goal with Looks is that it's fun and easy for a hobbyist, but powerful enough for the pros. But mainly I designed it to be my partner in crime for all my digital filmmaking endeavors.

Questions/comments/suggestions welcome!

Gold Rims on the Hoopty

Is this what the DV Rebel Rig of the future looks like?

It's hard to dis the HV20. It may not have the control that more expensive cameras offer, but the subset of controls it does offer might be OK for most DV Rebels. I knew we wouldn't have to wait long to see someone put an M2 on one, but Taylor Wigton has posted the first full-res before after stills that really sell this as a viable option.

It's hard to look at these images (the full-res originals are here) and not start doing some simple math—the HV20 plus the M2 and a couple used lenses comes in well under the cost of a stock HVX200 with two P2 cards.

I couldn't help but run Taylor's stills through Colorista. And while I was doing that, I thought of another fun thing I could do. See, as much as I dig shallow DOF and adapters like the M2 and my own Go-35 Pro, I know they're not for everyone. They reduce the DV Rebel's agility considerably, and that's unacceptable to some. So I ran the "naked" HV20 image through the new Magic Bullet Looks, with an eye toward roughly matching the M2 image.

Not a replacement for the M2 by any means, but something to think about. See you at NAB!

New Look

It's been over five years since I designed Look Suite, the look creation tool that has become the most important feature of Magic Bullet. The "magic" of the Bullet used to be its ability to convert interlaced video to 24p, but as 24p cameras hit the scene the Bullet stayed relevant and, in some peoples' eyes, necessary, because of Look Suite.

So what have I been doing in the years since the original Look Suite design? I've been using Magic Bullet of course, on my own video and on professional projects. I've been talking to users and staying active on forums. All the time pondering and experimenting with better ways of making video look more cinematic. Meanwhile, Red Giant updated Look Suite to run in hardware, for a massive speed boost.

At NAB, we'll reveal the result of combining Red Giant's work with hardware-acceleration and my new design for a look creation tool. It will be called Magic Bullet Looks, and it will be available both as a part of an all-new Magic Bullet Suite or on its own.

Rather than a regular plug-in with a ton of sliders, Magic Bullet Looks features a standalone application with its own UI. Called Looks Builder, this application is launched when you apply the Look Suite 3 plug-in in After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Avid, or Motion. Within Looks Builder, you build and edit looks using Look Tools; modular mini-effects for things like bleach bypass, gradient filters, and film stock simulation. All of these tools work in realtime and can be tweaked and edited in context. All processing is done in floating-point color. With over 30 Look Tools to assemble however you like, you can create an infinite variety of Looks.

Or choose a preset. Pop open the Looks Theater to see 100 different preset looks applied to your image (not a canned thumbnail) in realtime.

Magic Bullet Looks was designed to be easy and fun to use, but it's powerful enough for pros too. Filters and exposure adjustments work in real-world units. Color corrections obey industry standards. Cineon film scans and digital cinema images, such as those from the Panavision Genesis camera, are interpreted correctly and can be converted to video or left in their native color spaces. The same look that you develop on an Avid rough cut in video color space can later be applied to a 35mm scan.

That's a lot of talk, but this is obviously something that must be seen to be appreciated. Magic Bullet Looks will be unveiled for the first time at NAB on Tuesday morning. I can't wait to show y'all what we've been up to.