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The Color Wheels Mystery … An obviously wrong answer
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[greg janza] “This ain’t “color” rocket science.”
Is this really that big of a deal? I mean if Wheels don’t work “manner that fellow video professionals have defined as the standardized norm”, can’t you just use curves or color board? Hell, just go over to Resolve. Lots of gnashing of teeth over something that most probably view as a minor “issue”, if it is one?
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Visual Storyteller
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Scott Witthaus] “Is this really that big of a deal?”
It depends if you had spent days grading in X. If Apple fix it in an update then will it make previously graded material using the wheels track incorrectly? No-one likes to have to redo work. I thinks it’s a bug and it is only fair to bring it to the attention of editors who may waste precious time. After all, why use the fastest NLE in history if you spend days redoing work?
If this was a third party developer then the same level of debate would be warranted.
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[Scott Witthaus] “Is this really that big of a deal?”
I would say that the current set-up is entirely workable (if curious) and nothing to get too distressed about.
But because I am interested in this kind of stuff, I wanted to share my findings in the hope that it would interest others and perhaps lead to a better understanding of some basic color science principles that it does pay to be aware of since they can help with your work.
That’s all really.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Michael Gissing] “It depends if you had spent days grading in X. If Apple fix it in an update then will it make previously graded material using the wheels track incorrectly?”
Days grading already in 10.4, a dot-zero version of a major upgrade? Standard thinking among a lot of video/post professionals is not to jump on a major upgrade until some of the kinks/bugs are worked out that are inevitable in a major release.
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Visual Storyteller
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Scott Witthaus] “Standard thinking among a lot of video/post professionals is not to jump on a major upgrade until some of the kinks/bugs are worked out that are inevitable in a major release.”
Which is why it is important for the community to share these findings and warn others. So it is a big enough deal to debate. I also scan forums before jumping in on updates. My days of beta and alpha testing software are over, but the heroes that do it should be acknowledged for finding and sharing bugs so the rest of us can benefit from their efforts.
Given that you imply this is a major release and the color wheels are a major feature, I don’t understand why you question this debate.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “or b) you can dazzle everyone with your superior knowledge by copying and pasting impressive-sounding passages from the standard texts.”
Uh, … all I thought I was doing was posting material from a guy I had met online who knows BOATLOADS more than I do – so what I was starting to learn about might be useful to others.
If it came across as ME trying to be ANY type of expert – holy heck I’m sorry.
I thought I’d been SUPER clear about that.
Swear to God I just thought it was both interesting and informative and might be useful since there are people who hang here that are not on Facebook.
Period.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
@Bill:
I think I know what you are trying to say. Unless we are not sure what this is all about, we shouldn’t panic. When first confronted with FCP X in 2011, I thought: this doesn’t work for me. As we all know now, this was not just a panic reaction. The first versions were very buggy. They weren’t stable. I saw the beachball too often, and performance was worse than on FCP7.The new timeline paradigm (along with the new naming conventions) was the part where Apple was ahead of everyone. But this particular point wasn’t the reason for the famous PR disaster.
I came on board late. I think it was 10.0.6. Watched someone edit on a set on a MBP, and I was impressed. Wouldn’t have been if the app had crashed then …
Same with the Color Board. Not too long before X, I had learned Apple Color. Now instead of implementing a grading suite, they adopted the iMovie tool. I thought, they must be kidding.
So I learned Resolve. Almost without noticing, I found myself using the Color Board. It is so fast and intuitive. Is Resolve superior? You bet, but it’s not necessary for 90% of what I do.
While not being a colorist, I do follow professional advice on how to perform CC/grading, with primary and secondary iterations and using scopes for accuracy. For my way of approaching secondaries, HSL curves are my tool of choice, and now that they are in FCP, I am very happy.
Before having seen Simons video, I was already irritated that the new Color Wheels seemed to be less powerful than the pathetic Color Board. It’s like you say, I thought I must be missing some new ingenious paradigm. Is there one? I wish your color scientists could help us with a plain explanation. In my understanding, the existence of a, er, “3-way-color-corrector” just implies that each of he ranges is a selection, and of what use is any selection if it’s almost unlimited? This is the simple question your experts should answer.
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What isn’t getting mentioned a lot in a “wait and see” approach is the real world ramifications of the issue. Mainly this:
1) You end up doing twice as much mousing around to use the controls than need be.
2) If it is something that gets corrected or changed in a future update, your current corrections will likely all change after the update with exitsing projects.
3) The nature of the control is that it can induce needless clipping.– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “What isn’t getting mentioned a lot in a “wait and see” approach is the real world ramifications of the issue.”
To expand on that a bit in relation to the RGB performance of the wheels, here is the Color Board result when pushing the midtones of the greyscale test ramp to yellow:
Entirely as predicted by the conventional model.
And here is what the Color Wheels do with the same correction:
You can see red “whites” being pushed above one (100%) and the green and blue “blacks” being pushed below zero, very heavily so in the case of the blue. Similarly the green and blue “whites” are reduced, the blue dramatically so, rather than being pegged at 100% at the top of the curve.
I think it’s fair to say that this is not really desirable.
You can start to get back to the desired result by pulling the “Shadows” and “Highlights” away from yellow, but that’s two extra corrections to get to the same place, and even then it’s not exactly the same place.
Incidentally, this is not a separate issue to the one we have been highlighting up to now – it’s merely the repercussions of the exact same issue as they affect the RGB.
That is to say, there is one answer to this single mystery, not several separate mysteries. I think …
Edit: There is an added complication when dealing with RGB in that we need to factor in the luma coefficients but it’s best not to add more difficulty to the explanation at this point. Suffice it to say that because green, red and blue are not equally “bright” (to use a non-technical term for it) RGB corrections need to factor in those relative “brightness” values and if the input pixel values are not being correctly interpreted (as is the case with the color wheels in Rec.709) that can make life quite tricky.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Axel Schreiter] “Before having seen Simons video, I was already irritated that the new Color Wheels seemed to be less powerful than the pathetic Color Board. It’s like you say, I thought I must be missing some new ingenious paradigm. Is there one? I wish your color scientists could help us with a plain explanation.”
I hope this new video will help you understand the answer:
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki
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