How should I color correct my movie if I want to be able to make changes later?

[Noam Osband]

What can someone do in Resolve that they can’t in Color or FCP 7? Just curious. What would make that a better final product?

(Thanks for all the help today guys. This forum, as always, remains a life saver and it’s damn shame I can’t give y’all a proper handshake of gratitude.)

[Shane Ross]

[Noam Osband] “What can someone do in Resolve that they can’t in Color or FCP 7? Just curious. What would make that a better final product? “

Well, Resolve AND Color allow you more control over the color levels by far than FCP. The 3-way color corrector is only good for minor adjustments. Want to push things, or make extreme changes, or have far more color control…use Resolve or Color. POWER WINDOWS…FCP doesn’t have that. That’s isolating areas and grading only that area.

Resolve and Color produce far superior results than FCP 7. Now, if you had the original COLORISTA II plugin, that did wonders. Allowed for better color control, power windows. But like FCP 7, was discontinued years ago.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[David Roth weiss]

[Noam Osband] “What can someone do in Resolve that they can’t in Color or FCP 7? Just curious. What would make that a better final product? “

I could write a book on the subject Noam… It’s completely different from the toolset in FCP, but not that different from Color, except that it’s vastly more modern, has a much larger toolset, much more advanced in it’s round-tripping and export capabilities, handles many more codecs, and has much more advanced color processing.

However, as I said before, since you said you need basic color correction at this point, NOT a complete grade, you’re spinning your wheels at this point worrying about this.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Michael Gissing]

Round tripping via xml between FCP7 and Resolve works. There will be things like reframing or speed changes that might not round trip perfectly but it mostly works.

Do a textless xml export and then add your titles when the grade comes back. Make sure you ask the grader to render individual files with handles and export an output xml from resolve Do not choose the FCPxml option which is FCPX only.

Resolve is a vstly better grade tool than Color. I started by grading in FCP7 (clumsy) then went to Color (better but hopeless with stills) and now Resolve which is a lot better, especially with power windows tracking, stabilisation and lots more.