Colorista slow in Premiere

[Tom Daigon]

Communicate your thoughts about the product to Red Giant Software.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
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[Danny Nieder]

Even though the card isn’t a Adobe supported CUDA card, you can try to toggle Colorista to use the GPU instead of the CPU – it is under “options” at the end of the effect list. I don’t know if Colorista can only support certain graphic cards, so it may be greyed out for you.

Having said that, even though I have a GTX 285 in my MacPro – a card that is pretty highly benchmarked with Colorista – I find the process to still be pretty sluggish within Premiere. I, like you, struggle a bit with a workflow that allows me some flexibility after doing a color grade.

My current workflow which has allowed things to be somewhat speedy is after locking picture, I select all of the clips in the timeline and paste them into a blank composition in After Effects which matches my footage specs. This gives you one layer for each clip in your sequence. (If you have a very long sequence with lots of cuts, you may want to break this up into multiple comps) Most of the transitions and effects that you add in Pr make their way over to AE. (Warp Stabilizer will not, forcing you to re-analyze, but if you had put a colorista effect on a clip in Pr, it will show up in AE) Then, in AE you can do a color pass – denoiser, colorista and unsharp mask, etc – with a much better and faster interface.

Then, you have 2 options. You can go back to Pr and import that AE comp as a Dynamic Link, and add it to another video track in your timeline. The benefit here is that if you do have to make more color changes, you can work on your AE comp and have it update live in your sequence. But, the downside is that Pr will not playback in realtime (most likely) and the preview render can take a very long time, depending on your sequence length, codec, etc…

Or, you can render out of AE and import the file into Pr. You will have your color baked into the sequence and won’t be able to dynamically change it, but by rendering it in AE, you can leverage multi-processor rendering. It will be much much faster to see it play back in realtime. But, looking at your computer specs again, I think that may be moot. This is more important when you are running on a MacPro with many cores.

So, the summary is that Colorista 2 is slower in Pr than Ae, but you can give a try to processing using the GPU option, if available.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

If I recall correctly, Colorista is sluggish because it uses a custom interface and Premiere doesn’t deal with that well. Using it within After Effects should lend itself to being more responsive.

Of course, with After Effects you don’t have scopes. I dropped some coin on the Test Gear plugins by Synthetic Aperture and used that and Colorista as my main color grading setup within After Effects before Davinci Lite/Speedgrade hit the scene.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
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[Tim Kolb]

Yes, the plugin interfaces between PPro and AE are compatible, but not identical.

Red Giant has been chipping away at the issue bit by bit, as Adobe has, but it does seem like baby steps when the interface is so fluid in AE and mouse/drag interactions are ‘stuttery’ in PPro.

I use Colorista a lot…it’s been improving, so it isn’t as if the manufacturers are blind to it if that’s any consolation.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor