Anyone like the color board?

[Brian Mulligan]

Didn’t you hear… ‘Apple reinvented the (color)wheel’

Brian Mulligan
Senior Editor – Autodesk Smoke
WTHR-TV Indianapolis,IN, USA
Twitter: @bkmeditor

[Craig Seeman]

This from Stu Maschwitz of RedGiant and professional colorist.
https://prolost.com/blog/2011/9/27/what-adobe-should-do-with-iridas-speedgrade.html

But moving a project to a dedicated color app is simply not the way of the future for most users. Apple has the right idea by killing Color and making color correction a native property of every clip in a FCP X timeline—even if those new color controls are—how should I say this—a Colorista opportunity.

This is important, so I’ll say it another way: Apple screwed up by making the FCP X “Color Board” less industry-standard (I mean sure, dream up a better way—but it has to actually be better), but their decision to make color controls part of the settings inherent to any clip in the timeline is spot-on.

Color Board is a problem but the idea of building it into each clip is not.

[Alan Okey]

[andy lewis] “All this talk about FCPX trashing NLE terminology and UI conventions… What about dumping the 200-hundred-year-old colour wheel?”

Apple apparently felt that color wheels were too complicated for the majority of their intended audience. Thus, they created the Color Board.

Think of it as the Office Assistant for grading – kind of like Clippy for color.

“It looks like you’re trying to remove red! Just click and drag here!”

[Craig Seeman]

[Alan Okey] “Apple apparently felt that color wheels were too complicated for the majority of their intended audience.”

I suspect it was more of a UI issue. I’d think the color wheel is easier to understand because you can see the complimentary colors. If you “remove” a color on the Color Board you’d have no idea why the color was shifting to a different color.

RippleTraining did a workaround creating a Motion effect apparently to give you a color wheel.
https://www.rippletraining.com/using-the-rt-color-balance-effect-in-final-cut-pro-x.html

I think Apple uses the Color Board because they probably thought it was awkward to have three color wheels instead of a single board with pucks for overall, high, mids, low.

[Walter Soyka]

[Craig Seeman] “Color Board is a problem but the idea of building it into each clip is not.”

Agreed. Conform hurts, but it’s a necessary evil for using specialized tools. Avoiding conform where possible makes late change much easier.

Stu’s “digital rebel” POV has historically been to use the general-purpose apps you have for as many purposes as possible, extending them out of their normal areas of responsibility to save money. That’s a fine goal for many projects, but a dedicated app offers specific tools and workflows that general apps don’t.

Personally, I’d rather attack the conform problem through greater cooperation among apps instead of piling everything into the NLE. I’d like to see more applications understand the edit in context, to reduce the need for round-tripping or conforming.

It’d be great to have an industry-standard editorial XML spec so that all apps could read the same editorial file format and read from the same media. The NLE could cut; the coloring app could grade; the DAW could sweeten. Each tool could be able to access the edit decisions and add rendered clips which the NLE would use to replace the original clips for playout/compression. Each app could each add its own private set of tags to clips, and every other app could ignore (but preserve) any tags it didn’t understand.

In other words, one single project file and one single media pool that all applications could work with. It’d be nice if everyone could get along, wouldn’t it?

I think this could have actually worked, back when everyone used basically the same data model, prior to Apple forking editorial ideology.

Back to the color board — there was some discussion on it in the FCP7 review by someone who likes FCPX [link] thread which you may find interesting.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Marvin Holdman]

[Stu Maschwitz of RedGiant } – “I mean sure, dream up a better way—but it has to actually be better”

Nailed it.

Marvin Holdman
Production Manager
Tourist Network
8317 Front Beach Rd, Suite 23
Panama City Beach, Fl
phone 850-234-2773 ext. 128
cell 850-585-9667
skype username – vidmarv

[Simon Ubsdell]

A huge issue for me is that the “Color Board” ignores a fundamental principle of grading which is that luma and chroma are inter-related – adjust the luminance and you need to adjust the chroma to compensate. Hence the performance-enhancing value of a hardware interface where you can make both adjustments at the same time with trackballs.

In the FCP7 3-way CC, for all its limitations, you could adjust lift/gamma/gain and saturation from the same pane (unlike the hideous Media Composer “Color Corrector”). FCPX requires you to tab between Color, Saturation and Exposure panes, greatly hampering the workflow.

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Chris Harlan]

[Walter Soyka] “In other words, one single project file and one single media pool that all applications could work with. It’d be nice if everyone could get along, wouldn’t it?
“

We were so close too. That is one of the most maddening things for me about this whole experience.The growing interoperability over the last few years was spectacular. FCS forced Avid to move so much closer to open standards. XML was really beginning to function extremely well across many borders. It seemed as if we were on the edge of de facto standards. Then, bam, somebody didn’t want to play anymore.

[Michael Sacci]

The advancement of the integrated color was one of the things I was really excited about. I understand Apple’t thought behind all this stuff. It is so much better then what 3-way was. But I totally agree the way they implemented it just doesn’t make sense. As far as the controls all they did was give us something definitely and not as good. They also gave as 3 panels to work with whereas they could easily put all that on a single panel if they went with traditional color wheels and sliders. My biggest grip of FCP X is how real estate unfriendly the entire app is. It just doesn’t use the screen very well IMO, and this is most apparent with the color controls.

[Morten]

And another issue with the bastard color board – why did key framing color effects disappear?

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, File Server w. X-Raid
…. and FCPX in the garbage bin