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Premiere Pro Color grading? Resolve? Your workflow.
I’d like to just hear a discussion on how everyone is doing it nowadays. I switched over from Final Cut Pro X to Premiere Pro CC. It was mostly because Final Cut Pro X has a horrible system to color correct, much less color grade. The actual editing process I liked better, especially how it made the proxy’s for me for multicam but it lacked too many features.
I’ve been using SpeedGrade with Adobe Premiere for a while now to color grade my videos, the basic Lumetri panel isn’t enough for me as I really like to get pretty detail in my grades. I tried resolve maybe two years ago and didn’t like it. So this seemed the only option.
I tried resolve again today and I was pretty blown away by it. The NLE didn’t impress me, I’d still rather edit in Premiere or Final Cut, but the color tab was really nice. It doesn’t do as much as SpeedGrade does but Speed Grade can be over kill a lot of the times. It does however have some advanced features that SpeedGrade doesn’t have.
I was able to export my project from Premiere and Final Cut to the .XML file and color grade with resolve… BTW resolve is free.
I still think SpeedGrade in a way is still more powerful and a better product, it’s just the interface isn’t as good as resolves and it isn’t as easy as resolve. It took me a while to get good at it.
Has anyone else thought about using resolve who owns a mac and has Final Cut as well? I am stuck with Premiere and Speedgrade for another year but after that I could edit for free.
Premiere is so much better than Final Cut, but that’s mostly because of the color tools, even before Lumetri, it had curves, the color wheels, tons of different effects. But the editor alone isn’t all that impressive and in fact seems less efficient than FCPX. But FCPX makes the editing awesome but then has no good effects, at least that would be used as pro effects, there are no curves and the only basic color correction is horrible.
Are there any professional colorist here who use resolve and speed grade with Premiere who can maybe enlighten me on some things I do not know. I’d like to just hear what people here are doing as well.
I’ve heard people talk about resolve as if it’s the best color grading tool known to man, unless I’m missing something…. It is very very nice and easy to use, but it still won’t do as many things as SpeedGrade can.
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10 Replies
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[Tommy David] “I still think SpeedGrade in a way is still more powerful and a better product”
I think you might need to do some tutorials on Resolve!
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Hi Tommy, I am also very interested to hear how others do this.
Personally I can’t answer the question yet…
But to shorten the wait until more answers come in, you can do a search for “resolve premiere roundtrip” – you will find lots of valuable info on the topic.The ideal solution for the future in my opinion would be something that’s comparable to the “dynamic link” connection between PR and AE but I don’t know if this is even possible.
I will follow this thread with great interest.
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I edit in both FCPX and Premiere and grade in Resolve. I have used SpeedGrade, but gave up on it because the performance is too slow. I also have a lot of seat time with Apple Color.
First of all, I’m not sure why you think FCPX doesn’t have good color tools. The color board is designed in a different manner than a typical 3-wheel corrector, but it’s just as powerful. In addition there are other color tools and you can also create your own by using Motion filters and turning them into your own custom FCPX effects as Motion templates. An example from my blog here:
https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/building-fcp-x-effects-update/
In addition, there are plenty of good third-party color correction filters you can buy to augment what’s there. Most folks really like Color Finale.
Secondly, what about the Lumetri panel do you find insufficient? The panel is only a control panel for the effect that’s been applied. So to get more sophisticated, you can stack several filters as well as several instances of Lumetri Color to achieve desired results. For example, you could use one instance of Lumetri to get your primary grade and then stack a second instance with a mask for a secondary grade, such as lightening up and tracking someone’s face. Lumetri also permits source-side correction, which comes in handy in multi-cam projects.
As far as color correctors go, there are a number of “hero” systems out there – Resolve, Quantel Pablo, Baselight, Filmmaster, Mistaka and others. SpeedGrade doesn’t make the cut. Before Adobe acquired them, SpeedGrade was used a lot by DITs, but in very few post-production color grading suites. That being said, it’s a good tool, but one that’s been neglected in the last few CC updates, because many of its tools have been ported over and integrated into Premiere. That’s where the Lumetri panel came from. Resolve has largely won the fight for the “big bucks rooms” because of its power and versatility.
SpeedGrade’s design is a layer-based architecture centered on the concept of a “12-way” color corrector. Resolve is based on nodes and uses a number of different color tools. In many ways, SpeedGrade gives you a somewhat less harsh correction than Resolve, but to me it doesn’t seem as powerful if you need really “surgical” corrections. Both tools will give you very good results.
If you want to go down the route of using Resolve, then it’s worth it to really dive into the manual and invest some time in tutorials – Ripple, Tao of Color, Lynda, Color Grading Central, etc.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I’m sorry I didn’t see it in your original post, did you mean “one light” clip matching color correction or final artistic look?
Premiere pro is capable of one-lighting with the fast color corrector which is very inconspicuously named. Actually that’s the farthest from the truth! You can match color, contrast, saturation, hue, etc. of any clip perfectly in just a few seconds. premiere also has a version of lift, gamma,gain, with master, shadow, highlight separate points for the really tricky stuff or the large curves panel. It integrates with colorista too.
Once I have all clips matched up, I grade in AE with my custom AE templates as Speedgrade can’t do all the cool stuff I want like custom technicolor, tint maps, vision 3, etc.
Besides, AE is the only adobe product that can handle 64 cube luts so if you’re using speedgrade or premiere, you’re gonna get posterization. Plus they can’t grade with P3 monitors. Dynamic link is only rec. 709
as is mercury transmit. And speedgrade is also missing utility profile converter so you can’t prepare anything for theatres.
Best thing you can do is grade as rec 709, cross your fingers and select AME preset. Speedgrade is still unusable for professional work as any 4 hour documentary is simply too unstable. Have you seen any youtube clips that show someone zooming in a massive timeline in speedgrade. There’s a reason they you don’t!Resolve is used for my serious work but the lack of integration with adobe makes time interpolation sequences fail.
Since dynamic link disables the venerated multiprocessing for our expensive computers so you have to render everything out for any real performance benefits, AND all color correction can be done inside premiere, the real question is…
why would you even USE speedgrade in the first place? -
[Chris Wright] “Besides, AE is the only adobe product that can handle 64 cube luts”
I’m not sure that’s correct. I can import 64x64x64 .cube LUTs into the Lumeti Color panel.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
i just checked and can confirm that both premiere and speedgrade can use 64 iridas luts, thanks for the update. good to know!
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wow… I totally forgot to mention that premiere and AE use different interpretation engines for RAW, so you can’t interpret some in premiere and some in AE. They use different clean aperture resolution for the pixels(shift up 5 pixels), gamma, etc. Your clean plates won’t line up if you mix them up. As a matter of fact, I wonder if I should resubmit this as a bug. hmmm…
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Hi Tommy,
Question for you: What kind of color management tasks are you trying to do? If you can provide more detail about your current process and whatever snags you’re running into, that might help us help you.
I kind of look at color as two separate parts of the workflow. Color matching early in the editing process is for getting clips to similar color temp, saturation, exposure and contrast. Obviously those last two are in the luma realm rather than color, but it’s all part of the same process for me. After editing, comes color grading to create a “look” that I or the client are going for.
Recently I’ve come to wonder if it’s not really four steps because I tend to think differently during the secondary color correction that is done at either point, using masking etc.
If you are trying to avoid Speedgrade, the new color tab in Premiere with the Lumetri color suite works great and supports LUTs. For me though nothing beats SpeedGrade because of the match clip function that can get you close with the click of a button. Another option is Red Giant Colorista Free and LUT Buddy.These tools are simple and can help you get consistent results out of your workflow.
Resolve is an industry favorite for a reason: Unmitigated power. I’ve used it a couple of times, but for me, I just don’t need that level of complexity and control. For that reason I’m reticent to spend that much time getting good at it.
This should be an interesting topic, I’m looking forward to it!
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I agree Marc, we’ve grown to love, if not rely on round-tripping in Adobe apps. Exporting to XML and then into Resolve offers a similar process but not quite round-tripping. That’s one of the reasons I love SpeedGrade.
Even though I haven’t used it a lot, I think Resolve offers a little better color quality. For me though, I’m not doing feature films and none of my clients would ever be able to tell the difference. For them, quality means early delivery and under budget. That’s what SpeedGrade allows me to provide.
Thoughts? Comments? Tourettes-like outbursts?
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Hey Tommy,
I caught your comment about multi-camera editing in Premiere. If you think Premiere is not as easy as FCP, you might benefit from some of my posts on that subject. I can’t imagine a multicamera sync-cut workflow being any easier than Premiere. If you’ve tried it and had issues, find my post on the “secret” to multicam in Premiere Pro. Once you know how the program “thinks” about multicam objects, and once you get around the one mislabeled menu option that confuses nearly all of my students, I think you’ll jump to PPro multicam guru in no time!
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