Color Grading/Correction Adobe Premiere vs After Effects and Additional Questions

[Chad Andreo]

I was wondering what are the benefits of color correcting/grading in AE instead of Premiere?
For those of you that color with AE, whats the best way to batch edit?
Last, whats the best way to correct WB in post? I currently use fast color corrector and 3-way.
Although I always try and get it right in camera, there are times at live events in which I cannot dial the WB in accurately.

[Josh Bass]

A friend of mine who's a professional colorist kind of destroyed my enthusiasm for doing it in AE for one simple reason: no scopes. The color finesse tool seems really cool and powerful for many projects, but without something objective to measure what you're doing, you're kind of flying blind. Even with a pro monitor you still want to know where you stand with luminance and color levels.

Now, you can BUY a scope plugin. I found one for $150 or so. Do you want to do that? Premiere has scopes built in. I'd like to hear what folks have to say about Premiere's tools as well as I recently got the CS6 suite and don't know too much about how powerful it is for things like this vs FCP6/7.

[Pete Bauer]

If you're serious about color grading, SpeedGrade is an excellent option. It is part of the Adobe CS suite. It does have a color temperature correction tool that the color corrector effects in PPro don't have.

[Josh Bass]

forget what i said earlier about missing scopes. . looks like i was given bad info.

[Battle Vaughan]

(grump warning) IMHO speedgrade is a muddle, I know that Adobe bought it whole and slapped their name on it, but it's so unlike the expected Adobe interface that it's baffling to use. I wish they would "Adobe-ize" it. And Color Finesse is sooo nice to work with, even if you do have to hand off to AE......(end grump. Didn't mean to hijack the thread. That is all for today.)

[Josh Bass]

Apparently I have Speedgrade! Did not know that! SO MANY CHOICES!

[John Richard]

Hopefully at this year's NAB Adobe will demo big improvements in Speedgrade as it is a powerful color grading application.

Integrating Speedgrade into the Adobe UI and flow is a tough task to do as it is such a different interface to start with.

But very important basics like being able to output to an external calibrated grading monitor S T I L L cannot be done on the Mac platform. At last year's NAB Adobe stated they recognized that was an important issue and were working on resolution. That was a year ago. Many have had to move on.

[Josh Bass]

You just mean speedgrade on mac cant be output to an external monitor on mac right? Not that it cant be done period?

[Pete Bauer]

It does 2 monitors just fine on my Win 7 PC.

[Duane Adam]

Originally Posted by Pete Bauer

It does 2 monitors just fine on my Win 7 PC.

Pete are you using speedgrade successfully on a regular basis? I ran into difficulties with it but am now wondering if I just need to spend more time learning it.

[Josh Bass]

From the description it sounds like adobes answer to apple color...so a full fledged cc suite. So more complicared/sophisticated than color finesse or the cc tools in premiere.

PS in answer to the original question, colorista 2 is a cc plugin that works with a number of programs, runs about $300, and is supposed to be very good.

[Pete Bauer]

SpeedGrade was high dollar software for professional colorists when Adobe bought it from Iridas in late 2011 to complement Creative Suite:

http://www.dvinfo.net/news/adobe-acq...echnology.html

and I have little doubt that the interface will be transformed to be more "Adobe-like" in future iterations. I have to say, though, that it wasn't difficult to learn the basics even though I'm NOT a professional colorist...not even in my dreams. Once I got familiar with the interface and played with it a bit, I was quite taken with the power of the tools. I don't use it all the time, but it can definitely come in handy so I did this short video workshop to help folks get started on it:

Adobe CS6 DVi Workshop: Using Adobe Premiere Pro with SpeedGrade and Audition at DV Info Net

Hope it is helpful. If in the next version or two Adobe manages to keep the power of the existing tools while fully integrating into CS, I know I'll use it even more.

[Battle Vaughan]

Very nicely done and helpful tutorial, thank you!

I have to admit that for my limited needs, speedgrade tools don't seem all that more useful than the 3-way color corrector in PPro, plus the time-consuming file conversion to get into speedgrade in the first place. Perhaps I'm missing something.

...and there's a free plugin of Colorista available with similar tools, except for the the pre-set "looks" of course, but personally have little use for them....the Free Colorista plugin, for anyone who is interested, is here: Red Giant - Products - Magic Bullet Colorista Free 1.0

[John Richard]

Originally Posted by Josh Bass

You just mean speedgrade on mac cant be output to an external monitor on mac right? Not that it cant be done period?

Yes - as stated in my post that this year long problem of not being able use the basic tool of grading using an external calibrated monitor is a MAC platform issue. The Windows platform has many I/O solutions for grading judgement on external NTSC calibrated monitors.

And taking the time to learn even just the basic functions of Speedgrade and/or Resolve is well worth your time - so much more powerful than the internal color correction tools inside Premiere. Functions like Power Windows and Tracking to control moving areas of effects are just amazing in these true grading apps. Very much like Photoshop for motion pictures. Believe Pete when he tells you it is worth your time to glean the basics of either of these programs.

[Duane Adam]

Originally Posted by John Richard

Very much like Photoshop for motion pictures.

Or just edit your video in Photoshop. So many options in CS6.