Hey guys,

Time for me to upgrade a bit. While our business cannot afford to move to anything like Scratch or Lustre, I am looking for a solution as close to the DaVinci Resolve as I can get, but on a PC platform. We have zero opportunity to go Mac, so let's not go there.

Avid will be the host system, but I am unaware of the grading power of Avid and the Boris tools that come with it. Right now, Magic Bullet Looks is leading the race since it gives me some masking tools, and can do the equivalent of power windows, etc. I'd love to hear alternatives in the $800-$1500 price range.

Thanks very much.

Magic Bullet is not anything like a Da Vinci or any other pro color correction platform. It's cute and it's gimmicky, but if you've ever worked with any dedicated color grading platform, it will only annoy you.

The cheapest "Da Vinci like" color grading platform is Da Vinci on a Mac, which will run you a little under $10k for the Mac Pro tower, Quadro FX graphics card, qualified Decklink card and the Da Vinci software. Monitors, storage, control surface, networking cards & external scopes are not included.

I've never used it, but Avid Symphony is supposed to have pretty good color correction tools. That might be a pretty good fit for your shop.

Arnie, I appreciate it, but I simply CANNOT go over the budget I listed here. I've got another $8k of gear to buy and I just can't stretch it do this. I'll probably play with learning to do everything by hand or maybe just get MBL to do some stuff and call it a day. We have contracts for hardware with Dell and HP and those cannot be broken to bring in a Mac.. I tried 2 years ago and got laughed at. I'm no Mac fan, but a copy of Color or Resolve would have been most welcome.

Oh well, thanks for trying.

For that budget, take a good look at After Effects CS5 with its newly upgraded Color Finesse 2. AE by itself is a powerful CC program but Color Finesse 2 makes it so much better.

Like you Perrone, I'm a Vegas guy, but Edius has some excellent color tools.

Another vote here for Color Finesse in After Effects. I don't have CS5 yet but the version with CS4 is great. Import your footage into a comp and create an adjustment layer. Open up Color Finesse in the Adjustment Layer and have fun. If you need to do heavy secondaries with masks those are pretty simple to do in a layer. I'd say Color Finesse is probably one of the better choices for a PC and is roughly on par with Apple Color in terms of capability. Not DaVinci but nothing is at that price point. It does have it's own interface that opens up and I prefer that because I use the scopes as well as the image to do corrections. Render times are decent as well.

Might want to also have a look at Combustion, built in color correction similar to Color Finesse

Hey Perrone...

What's the going rate for outsourcing your colouring?? Is this a better option?

Hey Perrone...

What's the going rate for outsourcing your colouring?? Is this a better option?

No, not a better option. I ended up going with Magic Bullet Looks. Between that and AVID, it will do the job to the level I need. Not what I want, but it's what I could afford at this time. Should get it in this week.

I got one heck of a learning curve comming. Avid, MBL, Boris, Scriptsync...

This tutorial may be of some help. Just skip the initial commercial : )
Episode 22: Creating a Summer Blockbuster Film Look on Vimeo

Good luck with the learning!

Yes, I saw that tutorial last week. VERY helpful and thank you!

The learning curve is a son of a gun.

Even though I know Apple Color, or lets say I know what everything does, it's such a complicated program to use because the User Interface in that program is one of the worse I work in.

I just used Magic Bullets to grade my project here, and couldn't be happier with the program considering the price/User interface

KINETICS - The Story Beyond The Still on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/groups/beyondthestill/videos/13409661)

and the two different colors from blue to amber/warm are all in post. For the non-professional colorist, You'll basically live in the presets in Magic Bullet - they have so many choices and you can tweak them to your hearts content too.

Have fun out there and when it comes to grading, keeping it simple will keep you happy!

Well,

I've been playing with MB Looks now for about a week. I've played a bit with the presets, but have had much more success with making my own looks. The interface is a pleasure to work with, but it didn't take long for me to understand why a professional colorist would be grossly underwhelmed by this program.

The first big surprise was the lack of support in the looks builder for DPX, Cineon, or EXR file types. The second major surprise to me was the fact that you cannot direct output to your monitor. This failing is exacerbated by the fact that the program only has a single scope available. That being the RGB parade. Fortunately if there was ANY single scope that would be most helpful, this would be it. But goodness it would be nice to have a vectorscope and maybe a histogram available as well.

But for what the program costs, and what it can do, I am quite pleased. I don't want to sound like it's all doom and gloom. There are a few things I have yet to delve into with the program, and I will be getting to those this week. So far so good.

Hmmm...

Why someone would recommend Magic Bullet Looks over Magic Bullet Colorista for color correction eludes me.

Colorista is made for color correction... You might want to take a look at that, particularly if you're used to an actual color correction system...

Colorista didn't add anything beyond what I already had. I have tools for color correction. I wanted tools for grading. MB Looks contains Colorista's tools and a bunch of other stuff as well.

Colorista didn't add anything beyond what I already had. I have tools for color correction. I wanted tools for grading. MB Looks contains Colorista's tools and a bunch of other stuff as well.

Well...of course on Avid, you have pretty damn solid CC tools as you point out...but Looks is more of an aesthetic in my mind...a really good one (I like Looks), but I would not characterize it as a color correction tool on par with Colorista (which we both agree you probably don't need with Media Composer).

"Grading" is an interesting term. It -was- "color correction" such as it was, light bulbs and all in the days of Telecine...now it seems to mean "make something look more like it came off a telecine."

Nothing wrong with that BTW...it's just that everyone has a different concept in their head...like when you or I say "loud, obnoxious music"... For some, that may be Nirvana, for others Metallica, for still others, standing too close to a polka band is what comes to mind.

LOL!

Well the delineation for me is this:

Color Correction: Getting to a properly exposed image that is faithful to what was seen by the eye of the person behind the lens. This could be as simple as fixing the fact that someone shot with a the wrong filter in front of the lens, or it could be that the film or sensor was exposed half a stop or more in the wrong direction, etc.

Color Grading: Manipulation of the image away from what was seen through the lens. If the DP couldn't get light onto a subjects face and that is changed in post, that's grading. If the DP couldn't get gel on a window and it's 2 stops too hot and needs to be brought down, that's grading. If someone's shoes are the wrong color and you want to change them, that's grading. If the sky isn't blue enough because you forgot the polarizer that day, that's grading.

Media Composer has a decent set of tools for color correction. But for grading, not so much. Actually, what I saw in Colorista 2 this week would shame Avid's tools even for color correction in many instances. However, some of the add-ins for Avid bring a LOT of power.

To Tim and any other AE CS5 users: would "Color Finesse 2" (included with AE CS5) be for grading or just correction? Tim - can you see if Color Finesse 2 will output via you Kona?

On a side note: because this thread is about CC/CG, I think many would like to know that Premiere Pro CS5 is the first NLE to convert YUV to RGB automatically by using any of its color effects. There is a great article over at provideocoalition.com that says you don't really need a pro I/O device with Premiere CS5 for CC/CG.

Hi Steve,

I haven't done the test yet, but since the preview out of AE can be viewed on the Kona (Windows or Mac) as far as I know (I KNOW on Windows...), I see no reason why CF wouldn't work.

I have no knowledge of how the RGB conversion is done though...AE is RGB only of course.

I did read that article you mention...and I'm chasing down some additional details on the "pipe" in PPro. I did notice that the article notes that ProRes 4444 is RGB...as far as I know, it's not. All ProRes in Y'CbCr to my knowledge (which isn't always right...but I think I have this one on good authority).

Steve,

You can use it for both CC and CG. You may choose to use multiple layers with masks created outside of Color Finesse but it just depends on what look you're going for. That being said, you can use the Curves, Hue/Saturation and other native tools in AE as well with similar results but they don't provide the scopes that Color Finesse provides. It's all a matter of preference and what you're comfortable working with. I sometimes like to combine Colorista after I do the initial work in Color Finesse because I feel the color wheels there provide a stronger more bold result than the color wheels inside Color Finesse. Again, it just depends upon the look you're trying to achieve.

LOL!

Actually, what I saw in Colorista 2 this week would shame Avid's tools even for color correction in many instances. However, some of the add-ins for Avid bring a LOT of power.

I got some hands-on time with Colorista II last night and I agree! Huge improvement over version 1 and I may just end up using this as my #1 for CC and CG once I have a chance to do more side-by-side comparisons with renders and workflow. If it had its own set of scopes like Color Finesse I would be sold for sure. That being said, I can leverage the scopes in Premiere Pro or go purchase Test Gear 2 from Synthetic Aperture for After Effects. So far I'm really impressed with it though.

I just took a 17 minute master timeline and stripped out the CC I had on it in PPro and replaced it all with Colorista II.

I think "Looks" is a far different product and I think while both have a really impressive amount of control...they're both very different products.

I can't find a good reason to restrict myself to one or the other. :-)


(I'm rehearsing this for my wife...what do you think? Convincing?)


Seriously...IMO, both products' ROI has got to be some of the best in the industry.

Yep, both good tools with some overlap but really different tools for different jobs IMHO. I have both but don't use Looks very much anymore. I'm more into straight CC and CG but Looks is real good for doing some quick grading and getting of course that "Look".