Thoughts on Synthetic Aperture?

[Richard Dee]

Walter I was going to suggest this to you.

WHile I have not played with any recent SA products, a clients system I used to use often had
the Color Finesse plug in and I thought it worked quite well.

Believe it or not I really do like the plug in route rather than a stand alone app requiring XML.

I h

[Walter Biscardi]

[Deadhead] ”
Believe it or not I really do like the plug in route rather than a stand alone app requiring XML.”

The only thing I like about the standalone route now that I’ve used Final Touch is that the app automatically switches the interface to the current shot being used. With FCP you need to constantly double click the clip into the Viewer to bring up the filter to work on a shot. That’s one area where Final Touch shines in that it’s much faster and intuitive to simply select the shot and tweak rather than select a shot, double click it, select the Filters tab.

I did download the SA trial version and I have to say it’s incredibly slow on our Mac Pro. It’s faster to use the 3 Way CC in FCP.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Richard Dee]

Walter,

Can;t you set the viewer to “open” and click the filters tab, then any shot the playhead is over will open in viewer
with the filter tab exposed?

I seem to remember doing this.

[Stuart Ferreyra]

Back in the day we used Color Finesse to provide a higher level of color grading than FCP three-way color correction.
This was Color Finesse 1.0 and it was bad. Slow, buggy, no output to monitor unless you had Echo Fire(eben with it still buggy), but
still was better than Apple’s color corrector.

It got so painful to work with CF that we started looking for an alternative. Then Color Finesse was announced at NAB 2005
and it took a full year to be released. I remember we waited and waited and waited and kept calling and calling and calling over
moths to Synth Apert office and they kept saying in “two to three weeks” every single time. We got tired of it.

At that point we had heard of FinalTouch, and although we had to purchase graphic cards and extra second display just to run
the tester, we fell in love with it and switch right away. By the time Color Finesse 2 was out we were full on FinalTouch. Speed did
make a difference.

– From time to time I read posts about it, and it seems like a plugin for AE than an app to work with FCP.
– How about Irida’s SpeedGrade? I’d like to look into it as a back up.
– Another question is… can CF work with Tangent Devices?. I’ve tried the JL Cooper and it is not “there”. CF has a bundle with it.

If anyone tries CF, please let us know.

Stuart Ferreyra
Timecode Multimedia
President
Santa Monica, CA 90025
https://www.timecodemultimedia.com

[Walter Biscardi]

[Deadhead] “Can;t you set the viewer to “open” and click the filters tab, then any shot the playhead is over will open in viewer
with the filter tab exposed?

I seem to remember doing this.”

Been so long since I used that feature I completely forgot about it. You are correct.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

I assume you already know that SpeedGrade costs approx. $29,000 per seat and requires an NVidia Quadro FX card?

[Walter Biscardi]

[Mike Most] “I assume you already know that SpeedGrade costs approx. $29,000 per seat and requires an NVidia Quadro FX card?”

That’s equal to Silicon Color’s 2k price, well actually it’s $25k. So they only have the one version, not an HD version at around $5k like Final Touch?

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Stuart Ferreyra]

I talked to a sales rep yesterday. Irida’s will have the same sale structure as FinalTouch does (did).
SD – HD – 2K. The prices have not been set yet (I believe), but I should know soon. A test drive would not be bad.

If you were to get a 2K feature film job, you’d almost recup the investment. I do not think the learning
curve would be as difficult as going from FCP 3-way to FinalTouch. As many of us would go FT to SG.

Something to consider…

Stuart Ferreyra
Timecode Multimedia
President
Santa Monica, CA 90025
https://www.timecodemultimedia.com

[Stuart Ferreyra]

I just checked on the pricing. Iridas released the HD SpeedGrade version
for 9,999 EUR or $12,812 US at suggested price. By the time all is set and done
it could cost around $10,000.

Hope this helps…

Stuart Ferreyra
Timecode Multimedia
President
Santa Monica, CA 90025
https://www.timecodemultimedia.com

[Walter Biscardi]

[Timecode Multimedia] “I just checked on the pricing. Iridas released the HD SpeedGrade version
for 9,999 EUR or $12,812 US at suggested price. By the time all is set and done
it could cost around $10,000.

Hope this helps…”

Thanks Stuart! Well, hopefully they’ll bring it more to $4,995 to match the current price of Final Touch HD and yes, your earlier suggestion of a test drive would certainly be warranted. I will definitely look in to them.

In the meantime I received a very simple solution on the Silicon Color forum for our XML issue. Simply Save the Project first after it’s done rendering before Exporting the XML. So far it’s worked on two projects. This is why I love and support the Creative Cow communities! A little thing like that has saved me probably 4 days of work re-CC’ing the episodes.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters