Getting Started with Colorista II

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.

Update on Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 12:37PM by 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.

Update on Monday, July 26, 2010 at 9:26AM by Stu

There’s a new video tutorial up today on Red Giant’s site: Multi-shot Workflow in Final Cut Pro.

Countdown to Colorista II

Watch Red Giant’s front page today for exclusive info on Colorista II!

Not All is Crap in the World

I was having a bit of fun today combining the 3D Camera iPhone app (Alex Lindsay’s pick of the week on MacBreak Weekly yesterday) with Plastic Bullet (his pick a few weeks ago). After brunch at the amazing Brown Sugar Kitchen, I stopped by one of my favorite West Oakland sites: the concrete plant at Peralta and 24th.

No sooner had I started snapping my stereo pairs than I heard a loud “Hey!” In front of me, a dude in a hard-hat was pointing behind me. A guy in an orange vest was trying to get my attention.

Immediately I began subconsciously preparing my customary sanctimony. This is a public street. I’m just taking snapshots. It’s my right as an American. Today we celebrate our Independence Day. Etc.

(You may recall that I blogged a while back about a PDF you should print and keep with you called The Photographer’s Right, to help you with said sanctimoniousness.)

I turned to orange-vest man and he shouted over the truck noise “Hey, would you like to go inside? The angles are better! I’m the manager here, I can take you around!”

Say what?

Leave it to Oakland to continue to surprise even a guy who’s lived there for over ten years.

He led me around while I happily snapped, and I took his business card, expressing my sincere intention to use his location in a professional shoot if ever the right job came along.

There’s no conclusion here except that I thought I’d try to balance out all the whinging I do on this blog a bit. Not all is crap in the world.

Just the new Sony camera.

Magic Bullet Grinder

OK, another blog post to pimp a Red Giant product. To those who wish for a little more balance between these kinds of posts and my more philosophical rants, I hear you. But Red Giant’s been busy, and I think a lot of you are going to like this.

Grinder is an easy to use batch processor for footage from your Canon DSLR. It can convert to ProRes, add timecode, and even create low-res with window burn proxies for offline editing. You can also use it to conform (not convert, i.e. no frame blending or motion interpolation) a bunch of clips to one frame rate, so your 30p and 60p shots can become slow-mo clips at 23.976fps.

Grinder 1.0 is US$49 and available now.