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CC in CS4 Adobe Workflow vs CC in FCP/Color workflow

J Davis

J Davis

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I'm an FCP/Color person and I would like to learn more about color correction with the Adobe workflow.

Can CS4 After Effects (or pPro's ColorFinesse plug in) do the following?

1. Apply a color adjustment to an oval or custom shape vignette and then attach that vignette to a motion tracker?

2. Alter a vignettes shape over time

3. Copy a grade from one shot to other shots

4. And finally is there a Luma curve?

These seem to be the most obvious 'big ones' in FCP Color.
I am purposefully avoiding all of Color's node based filters as I am trying
for a comparison of Primary and Secondary corrections between the
two workflows.

Hopefully there is an adobe guru out there with a comment or two?
Thanks in advance.

:biggrin:
 
I'd say without a doubt Color is superior to Color Finesse which functions as a plugin in AFX. AFX can be used to great effect as a color correction tool but it's nothing compared to Color's power. The trick with Color is getting RED material prepped and brought in, which now we have some native .R3D support so it's pretty solid.

Noah
 
Thanks Noah.
Do you know how FCP Color compares to CS4 After Effects?
In particular to my first point, can CS4 After Effects ...
1. Apply a color adjustment to an oval or custom shape vignette and then attatch that vignette to a motion tracker?

eg
lightening someones face as they walk by would be –
- the color correction applied to oval vignette that is motion tracked to a persons nose.
 
Hi J

After FX is a compositor. Although you can color correct in it. It's primary function is not color correcting. You can indeed create a mask and track it to a layer and then color correct that separately but that will take 3 layers. Color is far simpler and logical for color correction. As far as native support for R3D, both of them do that now. You can convert up front to a log format or take a longer render hit at the end with native R3D import. Eithier way you have to render the debayer at some point in time.

Cheers, Chris
 
Thanks Chris, thats what I wanted to know (about the motion tracking I mean).

I think rendering the debayer during the CC out is the main advantage of shooting RAW in the first place.

The Adobe RED installer released two days ago gave the Adobe workflow a huge edge, not because R3D's can go on a pPro timeline, but because After Effects can read these R3D's and do a 4K out if needed. AE is the best color correction tool in the Adobe CS4 workflow.

On the other hand, Final Cut has Color which is buggy and limited to 2K.
Until apple gives us a heads up on whats in store with FCS3/Color2, for me as a short format indie film maker, the trade off is AE vs Color.
 
The big advantage to After Effects over Color for tracking vignettes is that After Effects has much more sophisticated trackers. You can use 2 or 4 point tracks, which Color can't do.
 
Although all the functionality and power is there within After Effects to do color grading and finishing - the user interface is totally unsuitable for it.

What's really cool about grading in a compositor is that it allows you to really dive into the picture and build up a grade in multiple layers, do subtle grain reduction etc.

But anything over 100 shots becomes a real pain in After Effects because of the layer-based timeline paradigm. And nothing even close to realtime previewing so you're essentially grading stills.

I've graded a lot of commercials and music videos in After Effects but for anything longer it's far from ideal and Color really much better for that - if you can get it stable.

Hope this helps,

Barend
 
Barend Onneweer said:
But anything over 100 shots becomes a real pain in After Effects because of the layer-based timeline paradigm. And nothing even close to realtime previewing so you're essentially grading stills.
Click to expand...

I agree that After Effects is not suitable for working on anything long form in a single composition, but if you break your edit into scenes it is workable. I would still rather use a dedicated grading application to grade though, and take individual shots into After Effects if I needed to do something more complex.

In terms of real time previewing After Effects can RAM preview, which is something currently not available in Color. Some form of cache in Color would be very helpful. Currently if it can't do what you need in real time, you can't see it in real time until you render and send to FCP, which is not ideal. Hopefully Apple will improve this.
 
J Davis said:
I think rendering the debayer during the CC out is the main advantage of shooting RAW in the first place.

The Adobe RED installer released two days ago gave the Adobe workflow a huge edge, not because R3D's can go on a pPro timeline, but because After Effects can read these R3D's and do a 4K out if needed. AE is the best color correction tool in the Adobe CS4 workflow.

On the other hand, Final Cut has Color which is buggy and limited to 2K.
Until apple gives us a heads up on whats in store with FCS3/Color2, for me as a short format indie film maker, the trade off is AE vs Color.
Click to expand...


I don't complete agree with the native workflows until computers become one hell of a lot faster. Getting the debayer over and done with at the start into a 10bit log format as far as I am concerned a much faster solution. We have worked with neg scans for years that way, and it works very well. Working with the native R3Ds means every time I have to make a change to my composite I have to render the debayer again which is alot slower. Not to mention ram previews and just general working becomes a lot slower. As far as a 4K solution over a 2K solution I don't really see the point. How many film do you know of that go through a 4K pipeline?

Cheers, Chris
 
Nick Shaw said:
I agree that After Effects is not suitable for working on anything long form in a single composition, but if you break your edit into scenes it is workable. I would still rather use a dedicated grading application to grade though, and take individual shots into After Effects if I needed to do something more complex.

In terms of real time previewing After Effects can RAM preview, which is something currently not available in Color. Some form of cache in Color would be very helpful. Currently if it can't do what you need in real time, you can't see it in real time until you render and send to FCP, which is not ideal. Hopefully Apple will improve this.
Click to expand...

I like AE over Color any time!

Try to send a fairly complex edit segment from FCP to Color and see what happens...everything is @#@# up. Missing elements etc...

With AE, at least, what you see is what you'll get.

Antoine


Antoine
 
chrisreynolds said:
I don't complete agree with the native workflows until computers become one hell of a lot faster.
Click to expand...

I think you are right given the speed of todays macs ... but '09 is almost here, Macworld is when? Early Jan? Snow Leopard is coming which should break the memory limit of 4 gig per application.

chrisreynolds said:
Getting the debayer over and done with at the start into a 10bit log format as far as I am concerned a much faster solution. We have worked with neg scans for years that way, and it works very well. Working with the native R3Ds means every time I have to make a change to my composite I have to render the debayer again which is alot slower. Not to mention ram previews and just general working becomes a lot slower. As far as a 4K solution over a 2K solution I don't really see the point. How many film do you know of that go through a 4K pipeline?

Cheers, Chris
Click to expand...


Wouldn't you rather CC without all that metadata baked in?
 
Nick Shaw said:
Some form of cache in Color would be very helpful. Currently if it can't do what you need in real time, you can't see it in real time until you render and send to FCP, which is not ideal. Hopefully Apple will improve this.
Click to expand...

I am praying that Apple turn Color into a rock solid, no limits work horse. They certainly seemed pretty proud of it during the Final Cut World Tour seminars earlier this year.

They had a whole section of their seminar dedicated to Color. Also they mentioned RED 5 or 6 times but they never mentioned the words 'canon', 'panasonic' or 'sony' once in the whole three hours.

BUT right now, Color in its current form is a major pain in the ass to use.
 
J Davis said:
I am praying that Apple turn Color into a rock solid, no limits work horse. They certainly seemed pretty proud of it during the Final Cut World Tour seminars earlier this year.

They had a whole section of their seminar dedicated to Color. Also they mentioned RED 5 or 6 times but they never mentioned the words 'canon', 'panasonic' or 'sony' once in the whole three hours.

BUT right now, Color in its current form is a major pain in the ass to use.
Click to expand...

That would be great! ...because the quality of rendered images is stellar.

Just get rid of those few bugs/limitations and it'll be a real delight.

Antoine
 
Slightly off topic - but for those of you who are interested in grading in After Effects, I STRONGLY recommend you purchase a copy of "The DV Rebels Guide" (http://rebelsguide.com). Included on a CD that comes with the book is a collection of great add-ons that will really help speed up the whole grading process.
 
Speaking about the DV Rebel's Guide and Master Stu, how about Colorista? Last night I had a chance to briefly play with it with some XDCAM footage and I was VERY impressed by how easy yet powerful this little gem of a color corrector is. Really. Color Finesse, Color and others do a fine job at playing with saturation, chroma, luma, curves, levels, gain, lift and what have you, but what separates the wannabes from the pros in the color correction game is the ability to isolate (masks) portions of a frame, make changes and be able to track those changes on all the moving frames of a scene, and to do this easily and intuitively. Color Finesse can barely do it, Color does it badly, AE can do it but with tons of work and know how and others that have gained acclaim at doing it quickly and intuitively, Quantel, Da Vinci, etc, do it for a LOT of money.
Well, let me tell you, Colorista can apply masks and track them VERY easily, and it's so easy to use and so powerful I was dumbfounded when I started throwing things at it just to make it fail and it kept doing it so quick that I basically got bored after a while. This app is worth a look. It was designed by Stu Maschwitz, a champion of the high quality-yet-affordable software and an AE master who clearly endeavored to put everything he loves about AE and other correctors into Colorista without any fuss. The only thing is, I don't know if it can work with 4K resolutions and/or if it would accept r3d files, but if it does, believe me, you need not worry about masks and tracking being difficult anymore...
 
Chris Hocking said:
Slightly off topic - but for those of you who are interested in grading in After Effects, I STRONGLY recommend you purchase a copy of "The DV Rebels Guide" (http://rebelsguide.com). Included on a CD that comes with the book is a collection of great add-ons that will really help speed up the whole grading process.
Click to expand...

Not off topic bro. I'm assessing all options before I start this next project.

Rudi Herbert said:
Speaking about the DV Rebel's Guide and Master Stu, how about Colorista?
Click to expand...

I will look into this one too.

One thing I like about Color is the vignettes are vector (can you have vector masks in AE?) and therefore it should be possible to tween the vignettes shape over time.

I haven't done this 'tweening' yet but it looks fairly likely that my next CC project will need quite a bit of this. There is an interesting thread at Creative Cow about this very topic but I can't seem to get the thread's link to paste here. Threads title is Key Framing User Shapes and it comes up straight away if you use their search engine.
Either way it seems do-able but problematic.

As much as I like Color, I think I have pushed it as far as practical on a Mac and in its current form.
It looks like AE might be the way to go for me but no firm decisions made yet.
Thanks for the info everyone – REDuser rocks.
 
At the end of the day, I think a lot of it basically comes down to the operator. I have a friend who is an After Effects genius, and he can achieve the most amazing and beautiful things. After Effects is just so powerful and flexible - you can do so much more in it than you can ever do with any traditional grading solution. I have another friend who is slowly mastering the ways of Color. Again, he can achieve some truly stunning looks - but there are still many things you can do in After Effects that are simply impossible in Color, just because the tools don't exist. At the end of the day, I think a really good colourist can make beautiful images using any tool that's thrown at them - but at the same time, if you've got a lot of time to play, perfect and improvise, then you can really get into the nitty gritty using tools like After Effects.

Finally - animating a mask over time in AE is pretty much the same as "tweening".
 
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