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Any IRIDAS Speedgrade users care to weigh in?
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask for insights from the current/prev user base from the good ol’ IRIDAS days. That is, we’ve heard from a lot of Smoke 2012 and earlier user, pre-BMD Resolve and Final Touch-era Color guys…but I wonder what you Speedgraders think now?
Curiously yours,
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
16 Replies
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I don’t know about past versions but there is certainly nothing to get excited about in the current version – it’s no Resolve or Color for that matter. I think if I was to use Premiere full time I’d probably rely on Colorista or Looks and take pass on Speedgrade.
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California -
As a long-time SpeedGrade user, I understand the product very well, and appreciate how well it works. I’m confident that the new generation of Adobe SpeedGrade will be even better.
It will take some time for the product to mature and reach the level of stability that exists with SpeedGrade NX. That is the case with any new re-build of an existing product.
The staff at “Iridas” (now Adobe) are great listeners, and they’ll work hard to meet the expectations and demands of the SpeedGrade users new and old.
Brian Buongiorno
Tone Visuals -
I’m glad to see Adobe adding color grading to their suite of tools, but Speedgrade won’t be very appealing to me until they get it connected to Premiere through Dynamic Link. Apparently right now the only way to get there is via EDL, or by expporting to a DPX sequence, which doesn’t sound appealing at all- aren’t those things like 8 megabytes per frame? :O
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“THAT’S our fail-safe point. Up until here, we still have enough track to stop the locomotive before it plunges into the ravine… But after this windmill it’s the future or bust.” -
There is a send to Speedgrade command but it took quite a long time for a simple 3 clip test. Not sure how it would work with an actual edited reel.
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California -
[Lance Bachelder] “There is a send to Speedgrade command but it took quite a long time for a simple 3 clip test. Not sure how it would work with an actual edited reel.”
You’d use an EDL. Then Speedgrade accesses your material natively and virtually instantly.
Dynamic Linking with PrPro is clearly high on their Todo list.
I haven’t had any experience with Resolve but I can see that the Speedgrade engine is a mighty speed demon that makes full use of the GPU on my geForce 470. I’ve also found the tracker to be highly intelligent, even amazingly so.
My take on it is that Adobe bought a software that is highly extensible and a brilliant team that wrote it. I think we’ll see some great engineering from them.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
When you use the Send To SG command, Premiere renders a set of intermmediate, uncompressed DPX files first. The reason it does this is because both Premiere and SG accept various native codecs, but not the same ones. DPX mainatins the quality. That’s a temporary solution as a result of the short turnaround time between the IRIDAS acquisition and the CS6 launch. For now, it will be faster to export an EDL and link to the files in SG.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[David Cherniack] “Dynamic Linking with PrPro is clearly high on their Todo list.”
I think that right there is the linchpin. Speedgrade needs a niche to fill.
If you’re working exclusively in SD/HD, it’s foolish not to at least have a copy of Resolve Lite installed on your system, if it can support it. And if you regularly work with 2K/4K source material, you’re getting your money’s worth out of a full Resolve setup (or Baselight, or Scratch, depending on the work you’re doing). And the process for getting a PPro sequence into Resolve is remarkably similar to getting it into Speedgrade.
If you only need functional color correction for quick-turnaround workflows, Colorista, Color Finesse, or even the built-in 3-way are going to have you covered. No external CC necessary.
Speedgrade will be most useful when roundtripping a sequence or group of clips is as painless as roundtripping to After Effects. I think that’s its niche, a full-functioning grading suite that integrates seamlessly into the Creative Suite “ecosystem.” And it’s not quite there yet.
Still, it’s probably my favorite addition to the CS6 suite so far. I’m glad Adobe took the route of adding an external grading application. There’s something very “Zen” about locking your picture and jumping into a dedicated grading suite. You’re totally focused on the task at hand, not thinking about whether you still need to trim a few frames off that clip, or if the levels on that music could stand to be brought down a bit.
And you avoid the “drag-drop-copy-paste” operation inherent to internal effect-based color correction. Something that I find speeds up my work quite significantly.
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2 things it definitely needs before CS6 can be a FC Studio replacement.
1) Dynamic Link from Ppro
2) Mercury Transmit – video out to your I/O card on the Mac.
I understand that it’s a new acquisition, etc., and it will probably be great by CS7 – but it still amazes me that it will just then be reaching the functionality of FC Studio circa 2007. (yeah – Color was pretty buggy way back then – but still – I could round trip to my NLE and output to a calibrated monitor – is that asking too much?
David Jahns
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Joint Editorial
Portland, OR -
[David Jahns] “2 things it definitely needs before CS6 can be a FC Studio replacement.
1) Dynamic Link from Ppro
2) Mercury Transmit – video out to your I/O card on the Mac.
I understand that it’s a new acquisition, etc., and it will probably be great by CS7 – but it still amazes me that it will just then be reaching the functionality of FC Studio circa 2007. (yeah – Color was pretty buggy way back then – but still – I could round trip to my NLE and output to a calibrated monitor – is that asking too much?”
Agree that these two things are the two that will impede adoption during the CS6 cycle.
As an insider to Adobe, you cannot dismiss that 6 months is precious little time to get what we did done. I can tell you that as a field person, I was amazed at all the cool stuff they did do. In the CS6 cycle, they completed their move to a brand new 64-bit engine, took some cues from Adobe’s UI design (including layers) and incorporated a first pass at integration. In addition, the AE and PS teams got the .LOOK file incorporated. So, I’m pretty happy given that there was so little time.
That said, we KNOW we need to do a lot more to make it as Adobe users have come to expect – best of breed integration both internally and externally. We’ll get there, just give us a little time.
Finally, while I admit my comparative ignorance around the speedgrade tool, I will say that feedback about stability has been very positive. That’s one thing that if you don’t have, no amount of integration is going to help!
Dennis – Adobe guy
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Is it not possible to go from a Thunderbolt connection out to something like an Ultrastudio 3D Blackmagic to SDI connection into a calibrated monitor?
Or does that calibrated monitor have to have a thunderbolt connection directly from the computer?
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