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Pro color correcting with Adobe?
Greetings All,
Like many folks, I buy FinalCut Studio and the Adobe Suite. FinalCut for editing and dvd authoring, but not much else. I use pretty much all the Adobe products, and spend most of my days in After Effects. Most of the professionals I know use either FCP or Avid, so FCP is the center of my editing workflow for compatibility reasons.
BUT, CS5 is so freaking awesome, and FCP seemingly so old and un-updated, I am on the verge of going 100% Adobe. Would save money and headaches, and I wonder if others are leaning that way.
The only reason I can see for keeping FCP is Color.
Here’s my question: Will Adobe ever come out with a full-blown and integrated color correction/finishing tool? I know there are lots of great products out there, but nothing like Color. Of course you can obviously go with other pro solutions, but if Adobe integrated a true solution, on Color’s level—it seems like it would kill Final Cut Studio.
Thoughts?
thanks,
Tom
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15 Replies
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Hi Tom,
I find Red Giant’s Colorista quite good, and it rivals color in that it is fully integrated as a plugin.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Yes I love Colorista. And Magic Bullet Looks. Awesome. Used them with glee on some commercials and a movie trailer. But I’m still hoping that there’s a full-blown color correction tool—with primaries, secondaries, a variety of color keyers, control surface, ability to adjust/update whole scenes, gui designed for big projects, etc.—in Adobe’s deep vaults waiting to be unleashed.
There are folks buying FCP Studio just for Color, and doing super high end grading with it. I’m tempted to buy Da Vinci Resolve (about a grand from BlackMagic). But for me, something like that from Adobe would fully complete the Adobe production package, give smaller shops a huge edge, and bring lots more feature movies to the Adobe platform.
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Just like Apple bought Color, my guess is Adobe would buy a third party plugin instead.
Can’t beat DaVinci in that domain, but the hardware is really what makes the difference, and that’s a bit more than a grand;-)
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
I use Color Finesse with After Effects. I find it to be a comprehensive color-correction tool when used in the full interface mode.
It has a full set of scopes, primary and secondary correction, color wheels, RGB sliders for master, hilights, mids, and shadows, vibrance controls, and the ability to use control-surfaces. You can perform corrections in HSL, RGB, CMY, and YCbCr color spaces. I think the current version even includes a highlight recovery tool.
It is included with After Effects (and not very well publicized.) Pretty sure there is also a version available for PPro.
Jim
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just to add .02 to the thread…
I was watching a demo of Lustre (discreet’s CC) and aside from all the actual color correction tools themselves….
I found the way you could sift, sort, group and view combinations of shots from an edit without harming the original edit to be about the coolest feature….and one that no plug-in could really duplicate.
Maybe that’s common in Color and Divinci too….but I thought that was totally the cats pajamas.
Alex
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That’s kind of my feeling as well. I love the plugins, and they are freaking awesome. I was especially amazed by Looks actually.
But working in a full-blown color corrector like Color sort of blew my mind as to the possibilities that a non-cc-specialist like me could achieve.
For a long format project, I think I’d still hire a colorist (in the end, it’s always about the person behind the “wheel”), regardless of what software I had. But wouldn’t it be awesome if it was a completely seamless/lossless/updatable/etc. round trip from Premiere? Right now I’m wishing I had edited my feature in Premier instead of FCP. But the two Colorists I’m considering are both set up with Color, and are used to the FCP workflow.
(And, even with the DaVinci software at just $1000, the full DaVinci setup is like $30,000. You can get set up with Color, with a control surface, for far cheaper and get similar results. It pushes smaller shops and Colorists to Color, and from what I’m seeing, pushes indie film types to FCP.)
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Can’t you edit In PPro and use that pipeline and then XML your project to FCP and pass it on to color anyway? Might have to skip roundtrip dynamic link…but that’s not the only way to get from PPro to AE and back.
Alex
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Yes, there are definitely ways to go from Premier to Color… But there are also challenges. For example: ProRes 4444 is super and Color and FCP love it (great solution for indie filmmakers for lots of reasons), but Premier, even with the new engine, doesn’t seem to love it so much… which might mean some unwanted recompression along the line. Has anybody tried it?
And, Color itself (as wonderful and powerful as it is) has hardly been updated since Apple got it. Apple’s too busy making iPads! 🙂
I’m just dreaming of a smooth round trip… a fully slick, fully supported solution from Adobe…
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Premiere Pro CS5 does DPX sequences…FCP doesn’t do DPX sequences, but I believe that Color does directly…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
I’ve been having the exact same thoughts about leaving FCP behind and am just about done with a test project. I’ve been taking extensive notes on the good and the bad points of switching over, and there are plenty of each, but the reasons not to are winning. I’m going to do a more extensive post in the next couple of days to see if operator error is playing any part in some massive issues I’ve faced.
All that ignores your Color question. I don’t believe there is a comparable program on the Adobe side of the fence, but Colorista and Synthetic Aperture both do nice things, as does Boris’s 3-way color grade module. To fake the secondaries, you’d need to work multiple layers. I think the best solution is trying out ways suggested in this thread to get PP projects out to Color.
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