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Advice on Looks Plugin – Time Sensitive
I’m working on site with a client on their system that runs FCP7. I’m just starting the rough cut stage of the project. My client does not want to take the project out of house for color correction, so I will be adding finishing touches as we go or as time permits. They have asked me to present to them options in plugins that supply preset color correction looks. I’ve used Tiffen DFX before and thought it was decent. As a few other options for my client, I’m starting to investigate Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Looks and GenArt’s Edge. Any advice on the afore mentioned or any other Looks plugins would be greatly appreciated in the next few days.
My client’s setup:
Final Cut Pro 7.0.3
Mac OSX 10.6.8
2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
24GB 1066 MHz DDR3scott skaja
tangletown post – edit•animate•design•composite•color correct
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2 Replies
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Magic Bullet Looks is a fantastic tool, it is fast when making adjustments and very intuitive on the learning curve. Beware! MBL adds a significant amount of time to your FCP rendering. There is no way around it.
In some of our FCP workflow we would establish the color correction and Look that we wanted, then turn off the MBL filter in each clip until we were ready for the final render. In other workflows, we would do the basic color corrections with the Three-Way in FCP, then export the final edit timeline as a .mov and bring it back in to a different timeline. Then we would apply Looks to the entire clip or slice the clip up into a few sections that would need special treatment.
We’ve since moved over to PremierePro where you can add MBL in an Adjustment Layer and switch the track off/on as needed. Much easier to play with in PP. It still slows down final rendering in PP because it does not use the graphics acceleration card, just the CPU like FCP.
Bars & Tone
SALUTE! -
Joe,
Thanks for your input. In regards to render time, I had the same experience with Tiffen DFX. On the project I used DFX on, I worked most of a day applying and tweaking DFX. When my client saw how long it was going to take to render, he opted to remove DFX and go with FCP’s 3-Way Color Corrector to meet his deadline. I don’t think there’s a way to get around long renders when doing hefty math, but your export/re-import method in FCP7 would certainly speed it up.
scott skaja
tangletown post – edit•animate•design•composite•color correct
tangletownpost.com
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