FCP and Color – Is this limitation real?

[Kyler Boudreau]

That’s good to know – yeah, FCP’s native color is lame. I’ve enjoyed using Color and it is easy to get great results. Just wish it could do it within the app.

BTW – was up all night working on a 90 XDCAM sequence that I put Neat Video on. When I rendered in the native codec the grain removal was blotchy. When I moved the sequence to Pro Rez it looked perfect, but then I had a lot of problems exporting the quicktime out – kept getting “General Error” messages.

Weird, but just thought you’d like to know that there is a noticeable difference with that plugin when not rendering in Pro Rez.

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kyler boudreau
http://www.theatereleven.com
ph.310.425.2231

[Stu Siegal]

Color is worth the effort. It sat unused on my drive for a long time, but after a good training DVD (there are many), I realized just how powerful and easy to use it is.

It’s not for every project though. It’s a tool for workflows which have a definite end point, features, music vids, docs, unlike corp. projects that get revised to death and then revised again a month or three later.

http://www.verite-media.com

[Carsten Orlt]

I have read the entire threat and agree with Shane that Color is far more advanced than anything inside FCP.

Kyler have you evert looked at the reconform function of Color? This is exactly what you are looking for.

Make your edit – send to Color and CC. Send back.
If you need to make changes make it in the sequence that you send to Color NOT the one you get back. Then send the changed sequence to Color again. Close it and open your cc’d seq. Then choose ‘Reconform’ from the file menu, navigate to the new seq you send after changes and after you select it Color will go through and update your seq to represent the changes. Only thing you do than is to adjust the changed areas and send it again to FCP. Voila.
There’s a couple of things you should be aware doing the above. Color will update the original project file after the reconform. So you can’t go back unless you open an archive version. So if you exchange a whole shot you might loose your initial grade. But you can always save grades so you can re apply them. When Color asked you to choose the seq/XML to reconform too you’ll see that the file FCP created is in fact a folder and the XML is inside having a number code. Bit confusing the first time but no big deal.

Hope that helps
Carsten

[Patrice Freymond]

Hi,

very interesting thread. Underlines a confusion that I think is a recurrent one, at least in these parts: There is Color Correction, and there is Grading. In french we have Correction Colorimetrique and Etalonnage respectively.

I am primarily an editor and do lots of Color Correction. That’s what I’ll do before a screening, at whatever stage of the edit. Because I am not a colorist nor had the time to study Color, I hand out the Grading to our guy with the Baselight system.

For CC most of the time the 3 way built in will do, or Colorista for more desperate or sophisticated cases. But that’s for CC. And when I work with MC or even a Symphony I still work this way.

A long time ago I did some Telecine work (Cintels and FDL 90), and we did not have a Pandora, DaVinci or such. This is why I am still nt a colorist. But You got me thinking about Color. I should mke the time to study it.

Thank you for an informative thread.

Patrice

[Mike Halper]

You’re using too many steps to reconform a Color project. Do it this way:

1. Save the Color project and close Color. Make a copy of your Color project as a backup. I always do this when reconforming in case something screwy happens (which can happen).
2. Make edit changes in the original FCP sequence you sent to Color and export FCP sequence to XML.
3. Open Color project and select Reconform in the menu.
4. Point to the XML you exported. Done.

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Mike

[Kyler Boudreau]

Mike! Okay man – now we’re talking. I had no idea I could re-conform via XML.

Sweetness.

This might actually help me do our feature in FCP. Can’t wait to try this out – thanks for the info.

_______________________
kyler boudreau
http://www.theatereleven.com
ph.310.425.2231