[Tig] color
Steve Hullfish
steve at veralith.com
Thu Apr 26 09:53:08 PDT 2007
At the risk of making a commercial plug for my own upcoming product,
I recently toted FinalTouch around the country to 12 of the top
colorists that I could find who would take part in a little
experiment. I am writing a book on color correction and at the time,
FinalTouch seemed like the cheapest and easiest solution for
presenting a semi-da Vinci-like color corrector using the same
footage to all 12 colorists. I didn't want to use da Vinci itself
because as I wrote the book, I needed to have access to the screen
grabs and specific color correction data that the colorists created
in their sessions.
The concept of the book is to show how 12 different colorists
approach the exact same images. It's a very interesting study. Some
images diverged widely from colorist to colorist. Others took the
image to the same basic place, but through different routes.
All of the colorists that I did sessions with were da Vinci colorists
with the exception of one Nucoda colorist (who has also had plenty of
da Vinci experience.) All 12 colorists sat down at the system with
little training and were able to accomplish fairly sophisticated
grades including secondary work. All 12 colorists certainly had
complaints about the system and had requests for certain da Vinci-
like tools. Some were a little frustrated by the workflow, but all
were able to do their work quite successfully and creatively.
It is definitely NOT a da Vinci killer. But we're talking about a
"free" program versus a very expensive hardware solution. I think
Sean's comment about not wanting to do grades that were supervised by
a client" is (or was) a fairly true statement. Any client used to the
speed and flow of a da Vinci session may be frustrated. I think that
Apple has solved many of the problems from his original post and they
certainly have the resources now to fix many of the others. I would
liken Color and da Vinci to a battle between Flame and After Effects.
After Effects is certainly capable of many of the same effects and
quality as Flame, but it's going to be slower. Many people prefer
After Effects because they have more room to experiment and play
since it's a cheaper solution. When I first showed FinalTouch (as I
was writing a review of it years ago for DV Magazine) to Bob Sliga,
which was his first exposure to the application, he said "This is
more powerful than my da Vinci." That is NOT to say that it was
BETTER than his da Vinci, but it had that whole Color Effects room
with its node-based process tree and eight secondaries that could
each do corrections inside AND outside of each of those secondaries.
Anyway, a straight ahead comparison of the two - or any other color
corrector with major horsepower like NuCoda or Digital Vision or
FilmLight or Pogle - isn't really too fair. They're all like
comparing After Effects to Flame or Inferno. The thing is that I
think the QUALITY of work using Color can be just as good as with the
"big boys." You certainly need a good control panel. The Tangent
Devices panel is very smooth and none of the colorists complained
about it like Sean did with the JLCooper. (I agree with him, by the
way about the touch of the old JLCooper board. The new one they were
showing at NAB - Eclipse - felt much better, though still looked
fairly toy-like.)
I also agree with Sean's comment about input and output, though with
a very integrated solution with FCP, it's more a complaint about
workflow than anything and many of the problems he mentioned have
been fixed by Apple. I know that workflow is a VERY important
discussion though and it is one that hasn't really been worked out
any better than to say "You import and cut in FCP. Grade and render
in Color then send back to FCP for output." That supposedly works
very well now. It should, since they now have access to all of the
Apple knowledge about XML that was previously "hidden" from them.
My take on the impact of Color is that the colorists' tools have been
commoditized to some extent. That is not a good thing for colorists.
I was an on-line editor before Avid came along. Avid commoditized the
market to some extent and prices of on-line suites dropped. Then
along came Apple and commoditized the NLE market even further, making
editing suites even cheaper. This in turn brought the general hourly
rate for editing down. That is true for MOST editors. My room was
$600 an hour before Avid. In Avid Symphony, I got $450 an hour for on-
lining. Unless you're in a Flame or something, I doubt there are many
Chicago suites getting $450 an hour any more.
On the other hand, I don't think there should be too much doom and
gloom about it. I am only a on-again, off-again colorist. More like
an on-line editor with deeper skills in color correction. When I have
projects that don't have the budget for color correction, I do it
myself. No colorist loses out on the work, because I couldn't have
afforded it in the first place. But even though I have the tools (in
FinalTouch/Color) I still hire a "real" colorist when the budget
allows it. And when I have higher profile projects I always fight for
the budget to do color correction with someone I respect.
If I cut a job in FCP (most of my editing is still in Avid) then I
would definitely consider keeping a nice smooth pipeline by either
bringing in a freelance colorist to work on my Color system, or I
would send the work out to a post facility with a "real" Color room.
Let's not forget that even though the software is free, you still
really need some serious dough to buy the outboard scopes, expensive
grading-quality monitors, manual user interface and enough fast
storage to allow for real-time playback. So not EVERYBODY will be
able to afford to really do Color the right way.
Many people will try Color and be frustrated by it. It's not a toy.
It is a real color correction tool that will be too complicated for
many, many people. I own Motion and I don't do my own motion
graphics. I hire them out. Smart people will understand their
limitations. But those people that are frustrated will have been
intrigued by how much better they saw that the software (and a
talented operator) could make their footage look, so they may turn to
the talented people on this list to do the work.
It may be a new revenue stream for many people here. Put in a Color
suite and let the ease of transferring the files from FCP become a
calling card to draw new clients in to use your skills. Have people
bring their FCP projects in on hard drives, color them and render
back to the same drive and let them walk away. These are clients that
may have never considered going to an outside colorist before.
Just some thoughts. Flame away if you like. :-)
On Apr 26, 2007, at 10:26 AM, Jeff Heusser wrote:
>
> I was more curious about the wider implications of a tool like this
> being commoditized, included for free with FCP.
>
> My take from the theater demo on show floor was that the demos were
> slick and there were going to be a lot of frustrated people when they
> tried to achieve anything in the real world. The demos were - first
> we neutralize the scene (click) then we make it look like night
> (click).
>
> C'mon, isn't Color as a point in color correction history a major
> deal? Forget the sniping... this should be a big topic!
>
> Jeff
> ---
> Jeff Heusser
> neonmargarita.com jeff at neonmargarita.com
> fxguide.com fxphd.com
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 25, 2007, at 5:14 PM, Sean McKee wrote:
>
>> I had posted my thoughts on Color when it was Final Touch back in
>> Sept 2005, after demoing it for a while. We ended up buying a
>> Resolve. Although it got heated for a moment the Silicon Color
>> owner not liking the fact that I didn't give a glowing review,
>> there was some good technical points mentioned. Not much has
>> changed since, and this thread can be looked up in the archives.
>>
>> I do remember hearing that the colorist/demo artist from Chicago
>> that was challenging me here with incorrect information about Final
>> Touch ended up going to work for Apple when they bought FInal
>> Touch, and he was also a teacher at Columbia College and quit his
>> job mid-semester to run to Apple and leave the students hanging.
>>
>> Sean McKee
>> Screen Time Images
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks to Sherwin Berger (RTI) for support in 2007. ====
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, April 25, 2007 12:27 pm, Jeff Heusser wrote:
>>>> I thought this was interesting perspective from Stu at the
>> Orphanage:
>>>> http://prolost.blogspot.com/2007/04/color-my-impression.html
>>>
>>> Thanks for posting this Jeff. The article to which you refer is
>> extremely
>>> informative and I agree with its points with respect to the
>> profession of
>>> colorist. It should be required reading for clients who wish to
>> migrate
>>> their high-end grading to Apple's _Color_.
>>>
>>> Rob
>>> http://www.colorist.org
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>
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Steve Hullfish
Verascope Pictures
(630) 717 9069 office
(312) 399-4237 cell
www.veralith.com
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