I see that Sweetie has hit the marks pretty well already... but I'll answer as well I guess.
For most color correction issues, why is this a bad thing? I'm not trying to argue with you on a process basis, or the professionalism of using Resolve? I'm asking more of a utilitarian/financial/time producer question.
Well for most color correction issues you have more problems than just hitting that "Cinema" style coloring. You have hotspots, off balances, and overall you can't afford to do great lighting that would really get that "flat" look colorists enjoy to work with. Another big issue, Magic Bullet's styles are the equivalent of Instagram filters for photographers.
Do you think your dad would be able to tell the difference between magic bullet vs resolve corrected shot?
We recently went over this question in my Editing and Visual Effects class. There is a line in the film industry. We are on one side of that line and the general movie-goer audience is on the other side of the line. When we watch movies we will notice things like the vanishing window in The Blind Side and say "Hey, they had a 4x4 flag over the window so they could see Sandra's face clearly, strange solution." while on the other side of the line the audience simply doesn't like that scene. They won't seek out justification, because they don't know what happened behind the camera.
We can go to the movies and decide we didn't like it because the coloring was off, they simply will say they didn't like it. You'll never know if they didn't like your movie because of the story, acting, lighting, etc...
So would my dad notice a difference? Nope. He simply will be impacted by an unknown element of the film.
Wouldn't it be strange to expect the producer of a low/no budget film to care about color so much? If we're going to be honest, the low/no budget producer just made a low/no budget movie. The inherent implication is that his/her "caring" is constrained by the limitations that a low/no budget production imposes on lighting/sound/acting/props/location/post.
I do believe Sweetie covered this nicely. And I do believe this forum has a slanted look on filmmaking. I would accredit that look to the very professional sound peeps on this forum. They have drilled into the heads of the users here that sound is half the battle. To an extent they are very much right, I wouldn't even give a bad sounding film a chance, but I also wouldn't give much of a chance to a film that doesn't have color grading or simply has slapped a Magic Bullet over it. Audio and Visuals are not the only parts of filmmaking.
It would be unreasonable for me to spend less resources on lighting and more on color, wouldn't you agree?
If you consider lighting, consider it as part of Color. And if you can REALLY afford lighting, you can afford a "building demo" or low rate Colorist.
I'm fighting with myself right now between magic bullet/speedgrade/resolve. If my timeline for finishing my film keeps getting pushed back, I might give up on the speedgrade/resolve part of the plan, and just go with magic bullet. My time is so limited.
Not to sound rude, but do you not value your time? If you're going to spend a huge amount of time on your production, put in the extra hours to get all of it to the same production value as the other aspects of it.
And I spent the last month trying to teach myself audio post. It's taking all of my time. And I'm never going to be perfect at it. I have to get back to real editing soon. It's highly tempting for me at this moment to just go with magic bullet.
Spend another month learning some basics of Speedgrade or get someone else to do your color correction and grading.
This is very tempting indeed, but how would this work online exactly? I've got 3.5TB worth of files.
1) You're doing high res Avid files? I'm firstly wondering why you're on Avid. Yes it's a high industry standard editing software, but without the actual Avid machines, the program is a lackluster battle. Working on an actual Avid machine? Holy shit. You can afford a colorist.
Lol... and yea you're way beyond having files transferred through a server... a shipped harddrive would be the most efficient route, as already said.
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