FCP7 review by someone who likes FCPX

[Walter Soyka]

[Craig Seeman] “The odd thing about it (IMHO) is that I think the Color Wheel makes it easier to understand color theory (color in practice actually). With a color wheel you can see that as you reduce a color, the complimentary color will become more obvious. When you change hue you can see what the new complimentary color is as well.”

I have avoided ranting about the color board, but since you and Alan brought it up…

You’re absolutely right that the color wheel is grounded in color theory. If you know one, you know the other. The color board, on the other hand, allows people with zero understanding of color theory to attempt to make color decisions. It’s divorced from the physics of color. “I don’t want my image to be bluer, I just want it to be less yellow!”

I think that FCPX in general is designed to maximize power while minimizing understanding. Skip the discipline of actually learning the craft and its underlying concepts, but get good-enough results fast.

I suppose that many will see this is a good thing, but I think it’s a terrible shame with sad implications for our craft. See my out-of-context Michael Crichton quote [link] on that subject.

Have I reached a get-off-my-lawn moment here?

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

[Geoff Dills]

[Craig Seeman] “I’d like to see an option which would allow one to switch between the wheel and the board.”

One option to use a wheel can be done via a motion invented grading tool

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/344/1160

part of the genius Brendan’s Color Grading tool.

Best,
Geoff

[Mark Dobson]

Hi Alban,

Brilliant analysis, mirrors my experience of delving back into FCP7 from 2 months of working in FCP X.

We rarely reopen FCP7 projects once they are completed. Sometimes programmes need re-branding but that work is done on safety sub-masters.

Sometimes I reopen old projects to find out archive HD Tape contents.

I’ve now completed 4 reasonably complicated short programmes on FCP X and can’t really see myself going backwards. And that is what it feels like opening up FCP7 – going backwards.

However – if external monitoring doesn’t look like materialising after a reasonable period of time I might have to reluctantly look elsewhere.

Thanks for all you posts and the excellent FCPX_Megatest blog.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “I suppose that many will see this is a good thing, but I think it’s a terrible shame with sad implications for our craft. See my out-of-context Michael Crichton quote [link] on that subject.”

Karate masters that don’t kill their wives are colorists? 😀 Just kidding.

At least the controls are there for people to learn and understand, even if it’s not based on color wheel theory (there’s two ways to get where you’re going now in your example, “remove yellow” or add blue). I think it’s worse and you learn less when someone runs it through a preset program and said “I graded this”, which really means, I bought the $50 plugin and picked a preset.

If the color board allows someone to actually study what is going on, at least that person is learning something along the way, I would hope.

As far as having apprentices in this business, that has been dying for a long time. There aren’t many assistants in shops anymore. If a shop does have an assistant, they aren’t thinking about editing all the time because they also do everything else, including the accounting.

As I said in some other post around here, all of this is changing, and changing very fast. It’s getting easier to make higher quality material, no matter if you agree with the means by which it was achieved, or not. The fragmentation continues.

I do find it amusing that one of the icons for the color board is a color wheel.

Jeremy

[Alan Okey]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I think it’s worse and you learn less when someone runs it through a preset program and said “I graded this”, which really means, I bought the $50 plugin and picked a preset.”

That describes the majority of videos one can see on the web lately. Magic Bullet Looks? Check. Obligatory tilt-shift filter? Check. Vignetting? Check. Forced shallow depth of field in every shot, just to prove it’s cinematic? Check. Coherent script, great dialogue, good acting? (crickets…)

[Alban Egger]

[Jamie Franklin] ”
The FCX corrector blows. I can’t even believe they were serious with releasing it as a replacement. It boggles the mind…”

I strongly disagree. The colourboard is square, yes, but in its functionality it is far superior to the old 3-way cc-tool.
16-bit
Built in secondary corrections
Possible to be animated

It is not Color, but this is FinalCutPro for 299 and not FinalCutStudio for 1099 anymore. And the reason to go to Color is gone with this tool for many uses. If you need more…..wait or use another NLE

[Walter Soyka]

First, my apologies to Alban. This has veered off-topic from his review, which I thought was a really fresh perspective. We’ve all been thinking of FCPX in terms of FCP7, and thinking about FCP7 in terms of FCPX is a really interesting twist.

Back to the color board…

Yes, the Crichton quote is absolutely overblown in this context!

I understand the market imperative for getting a good-enough result as fast as possible, but shortcuts have consequences. I think the mindset behind the color board isn’t all that far-removed from one-button plugins and presets: you can get a shiny, glossy result very fast, but without any understanding of how you got there.

[Jeremy Garchow] “At least the controls are there for people to learn and understand, even if it’s not based on color wheel theory (there’s two ways to get where you’re going now in your example, “remove yellow” or add blue).”

The color wheel is the mathematical representation of color theory. Removing yellow IS adding blue, which is obvious on the polar wheel (which models how the math really works), but totally hidden on the rectangular board (which models what the user may want to do). Why removing a lot of yellow introduces a blue cast will be totally lost on someone who learns color in FCPX, because the conceptual model doesn’t match the math.

We are setting the bar so low that you don’t have to know even the most fundamental concepts about how color works before you start color grading. I think this leads to good-enough results quickly, but to get from good results to great ones, you have to unlearn what FCPX has taught.

[Jeremy Garchow] “As I said in some other post around here, all of this is changing, and changing very fast. It’s getting easier to make higher quality material, no matter if you agree with the means by which it was achieved, or not. The fragmentation continues.”

I agree — I’m just sad to see the change in the culture. Our tools didn’t always encourage mediocrity.

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

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “Why removing a lot of yellow introduces a blue cast will be totally lost on someone who learns color in FCPX, because the conceptual model doesn’t match the math.”

I totally understand. Really. But I am saying at least there is something in there besides a crap load of presets. I think that if people really want to understand it, they will pick up a book or do more exercises, or get someone to pay for their training. In the dog eat dog world that it is, that will be hard to come by.

The Hue curves in Color are similar to the color board in X. I don’t think those curves make Color a lesser grading tool.

How many editors have no idea how the media gets in to the system, or what happens to it once it’s in there? Or what a render file is and how to trash it? This doesn’t make them any worse editors. It makes them terrible system managers, but they could care less about that.

Media 100 back in the day had terrible color tools, absolutely terrible, and it was considered a very good editing system. Sure, “it wasn’t Avid”, but it a bit higher than mediocre and had the best compressed codec around back in the day. It got the job done and done well.

It did have awesome audio tools, though. 🙂

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I totally understand. Really. But I am saying at least there is something in there besides a crap load of presets.”

Ok — agreed!

[Jeremy Garchow] “The Hue curves in Color are similar to the color board in X. I don’t think those curves make Color a lesser grading tool.”

I think the resemblance is superficial, though. Color’s secondary curves’ B-spline controls are about making an adjustment in one axis to a specific range in another, and that makes just as much sense (and is far easier to manipulate) on a rectangular plot versus a polar plot.

[Jeremy Garchow] “How many editors have no idea how the media gets in to the system, or what happens to it once it’s in there? Or what a render file is and how to trash it? This doesn’t make them any worse editors. It makes them terrible system managers, but they could care less about that.”

I think this is a different conversation. You can be a good editor without understanding what the NLE is doing under the hood, but can you be a good editor without understanding how the editorial tools themselves work?

I think that understanding how the color tools work so you can manipulate the grade with intention is more analogous to understanding how the NLE timeline tools work so you can manipulate your edits with intention.

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

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “I think the resemblance is superficial, though. Color’s secondary curves’ B-spline controls are about making an adjustment in one axis to a specific range in another, and that makes just as much sense (and is far easier to manipulate) on a rectangular plot versus a polar plot.”

I’m not so sure about that. If you take the color board at face value, you say, “I want to drag green out here at this value (black,grey,white)”. The hue controls in Color are similar (not the same, but similar).

[Walter Soyka] “I think this is a different conversation. You can be a good editor without understanding what the NLE is doing under the hood, but can you be a good editor without understanding how the editorial tools themselves work?”

Sorry, I am not trying to start a bad argument or anything, I am just talking about this. I think this is different. The color board is still a tool. Yes, it doesn’t align with the wheel, and yes, the theory behind color might get lost on some, but it is still viable. This doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t learn to use that tool and get similar results out of it. So what if they did add yellow instead of minus blue, the intended result is the same “color”. In that sense, they are still using a tool. In X, you can do ripple edits using just the Selection Tool, does that make me a worse editor for not knowing what the ripple tool is in FCP? I can make the same edit.

2+2=4. So does 16/2 – 4. Same result, very different ways to get there. A color grade (and edit for that matter) is usually about the result, at least a lot of clients see it that way. 🙂