Color Correction Software

moonshieldmedia

moonshieldmedia

I come from a Photoshop background and I've gotten very good at manipulating color with its many tools, but whenever I open FCP 7 and try to color my footage with the 3-way color correction filter, I always feel so limited. I like to get very creative and most of the time I'm not trying to match the colors of real life.

Is there any better software out there with more control or am I just not utilizing all that Final Cut has to offer?

What is the industry standard in Hollywood post-production? I've seen videos of professionals with color grading hardware and actual physical color wheels, but that's probably too expensive for me.
 
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moonshieldmedia said:
I come from a Photoshop background and I've gotten very good at manipulating color with its many tools, but whenever I open FCP 7 and try to color my footage with the 3-way color correction filter, I always feel so limited. I like to get very creative and most of the time I'm not trying to match the colors of real life.

Is there any better software out there with more control or am I just not utilizing all that Final Cut has to offer?

What is the industry standard in Hollywood post-production? I've seen videos of professionals with color grading hardware and actual physical color wheels, but that's probably too expensive for me.
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A lot of people in the indie film world from Philip Bloom to Seth Worley are using a combination of Colorista and Looks from Magic Bullet. There is a learning curve, but if you've semi-mastered Photoshop it won't take long to be doing your own thing with Magic Bullet.

Check out these color artists from Crooked Path Films who do everything in MB Looks, i believe.

http://vimeo.com/10851729
 
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The 3 way CC in FCP is a starting point... there are tons of other filters you can use and complex masking tools to do the same thing colorista or MB looks would do -- not as efficiently, but free. If you have a version of FCStudio, you probably have color -- which is a professional coloring software.
 
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Im starting to regret my MBLooks purchase. With colorista free, synthetic aperture and other built in AE tools, I almost never use it. I find my self using it for stupid things simply because I spent the money and want to use it.
 
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I find FCP's color corrector pretty difficult to get good results out of, and I've never found the magic bullet plugins to be significantly better unless you're just using their presets. If you've got FCP7, you've also got Color, and I'd recommend giving it a shot. The learning curve can be a bit steep, especially since it's interface is such a mess, but once you get the basics down you'll be amazed at how much control it gives you - it's absolutely worth the time it takes to learn it. Coming from a Photoshop background where you're likely very comfortable working with curves the 'Primary In' room alone will probably give you the kind of control you're used to.
 
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I just googled "industry standard color correction software" and my own thread from a year ago was one of the top results! haha

Any new information to be added here?

I'm not a fan of magic bullet or any other cheap plug-ins or filters. I love Da Vinci Resolve, but it can't run on my Macbook Pro because of the gfx card.

And the unfriendly interface turned me away from Apple Color.

What's left to try?
 
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Adobe Speedgrade, and you can also do video with the newer versions of Adobe lightroom.

If you've got thunderbolt on your MBP, you could use one of Sonnet's thunderbolt boxes to give you some external pcie expansion slots to add a GPU or two that will let you use resolve.
 
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Will Vincent said:
Adobe Speedgrade, and you can also do video with the newer versions of Adobe lightroom.

If you've got thunderbolt on your MBP, you could use one of Sonnet's thunderbolt boxes to give you some external pcie expansion slots to add a GPU or two that will let you use resolve.
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I don't think my version of Lightroom does videos at full resolution, but I'll look into it. (edit: I guess it compresses video upon export, so that's no good for me)

I had heard about Speedgrade but I couldn't remember the name. Thanks, I'll look into this as well.
 
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DaVinci, Scratch, Lustre, Baselight are all pretty widely used at a professional level.

If you don't have the appropriate graphics card to run DaVinci Free, you're probably going to run into issues attempting to run any others. Try Speedgrade - I'm not the biggest fan of it but it's a bit more aligned with the Adobe workflow (i.e. layer based rather than node based).
 
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jax_rox said:
DaVinci, Scratch, Lustre, Baselight are all pretty widely used at a professional level.

If you don't have the appropriate graphics card to run DaVinci Free, you're probably going to run into issues attempting to run any others. Try Speedgrade - I'm not the biggest fan of it but it's a bit more aligned with the Adobe workflow (i.e. layer based rather than node based).
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Bought this Macbook Pro new in 2012 so I was very stunned to find out Resolve won't run on it. I own the BMC too, so the full version of Resolve came free. Ended up having to sell it.

I don't think I'll like Speedgrade after looking into it, but Scratch looks interesting so far
 
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moonshieldmedia said:
Bought this Macbook Pro new in 2012 so I was very stunned to find out Resolve won't run on it. I own the BMC too, so the full version of Resolve came free. Ended up having to sell it.

I don't think I'll like Speedgrade after looking into it, but Scratch looks interesting so far
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Is it a Retina MBP?

I personally could never get my head around Scratch but many professionals use it.
 
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moonshieldmedia said:
Bought this Macbook Pro new in 2012 so I was very stunned to find out Resolve won't run on it. I own the BMC too, so the full version of Resolve came free. Ended up having to sell it.

I don't think I'll like Speedgrade after looking into it, but Scratch looks interesting so far
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The video card necessary to make it work is/was an upgrade. The MBP I have (from my employer) has the upgraded video card. But.. don't completely overlook my previous comment. You can get, basically a breakout box, that'll let you add regular off the shelf PCI video card(s), which after installing the necessary CUDA driver would allow you to run resolve.

And really, what they give you in the free version is pretty amazing, and certainly plenty of power for most people -- aside from the resolution limitations in the free version perhaps
 
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moonshieldmedia said:
Bought this Macbook Pro new in 2012 so I was very stunned to find out Resolve won't run on it. I own the BMC too, so the full version of Resolve came free. Ended up having to sell it.

I don't think I'll like Speedgrade after looking into it, but Scratch looks interesting so far
Click to expand...

The problem with this is that Resolve won't run on ATI graphics cards, only nVidia. Now that Apple switched over to integrated ATI cards, it's almost impossible.
 
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