So, if cost isn't an object and I can afford either Color Finesse or FinalTouch SD, which one should I get? FinalTouch is about 400 dollars more than CF, but they both sound like great tools. I can't decide. Any suggestions?

Are you a professional colorist, or just an editor.

Final touch is VERY complex and meant for pros. Color Finesse it still complex, but a bit easier to figure out.

Surely not a professional colorist, but I've done quite a bit of work on still images. I come from the levels world and I saw a demo of FinalTouch and you can work with either levels or vectorscopes too. I like both but know more about levels and like that I can do either.

I can learn anything though, I'm very good with picking up how to use a program well so I'm not worried about that. I think I'd like to learn how to use FinalTouch because I think it will be an invaluable tool to know.

How about quality though? Are both the same?

Are you a professional colorist, or just an editor.

Final touch is VERY complex and meant for pros. Color Finesse it still complex, but a bit easier to figure out.

Shane, I've been thinking more about Color Finesse lately. First of all, it's cheaper, and second, it seems to do about the same stuff that FinalTouch can do. Have you had any experience with Color Finesse? If so, what do you think of it? Is it just overkill for my miniDV footage?

Anything to help DV footage look better is good. No, it isn't overkill. And I have only played with the demo, but I really like the feel of it. I can really work with it. But I come from an Avid background, and it has the same control surface as an Avid Symphony.

I think FInal Touch would be overkill.

How much can you color correct chroma-subsampled DV anyway? In my experience, it falls apart when you make more than the most basic of adjustments.

While we are on the subject, do any of these programs work on DV in its native color space (4:1:1 or 4:2:0) or do they all convert to RGB first? What about After Effects' internal engine (since Color Finesse is a plug-in for it)?

Actually, Finesse is now available as a plug in for AE, FCP, and Adobe PPro, and the website they support more than that too. Here's a little about what they say about it.

-Uses 32-bit floating-point color space for incredible resolution and latitude.
-Performs corrections in HSL, RGB, CMY, and YCbCr color spaces.

Compatibility with After Effects 6.5 and 7.0.
Compatibility with Avid editing systems, including Media Composer, Xpress, and Symphony, when using Profound Effects Elastic Gasket™.
Compatibility with Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 and 2.0, including support for YUV data.
Compatibility with Discreet Combustion 3 and 4.
Improved performance.

Not too shabby.

I haven't played with CF2, but Final Touch has some things in it that are nice:
#1- motion tracking
#2- motion tracking
#3- colorFX: Lets you make custom looks.

In terms of power, I'd probably lean towards Final Touch. Although I don't really "get" Color Finesse. I haven't worked with it enough to understand how you'd grade pictures quickly, or how you can do more powerful things in it (i.e. masking + motion tracking).


Both programs have things about them that aren't as good as they can be.
CF1: only operating on stills really hinders things.
Final Touch: "halo" effect on vignette/mask, FCP import doesn't always work, stability, the product is not very mature, the interface has some really annoying aspects without the control surface

How much can you color correct chroma-subsampled DV anyway? In my experience, it falls apart when you make more than the most basic of adjustments.

You can blur the chroma or the mask to get better results. Final Touch HD does this ok. FCP does this even better, if you can stand the render speed and the interface.

You can blur the chroma or the mask to get better results. Final Touch HD does this ok. FCP does this even better, if you can stand the render speed and the interface.

Glenn - When you say the blur, are you talking about the Color Smoothing 4:1:1 filter?

In Final Touch, you can really fix up DV chroma though - http://www.nattress.com/Products/FinalTouch/FTGChromaSharpen.htm is the new plugins that I'm selling that do just that! As you can see, it's not a chroma blur, but a full reconstruction of the chroma.

Graeme

Graeme, would you say then that if I could get either one, CF or FT, I should go with FT? I also think that FT really has a good future and that if I learn how to use it really good then I'll have a very good skill to use under my belt.

Well, I develop plugins for FT so I'm biassed! But if you use that, you can probably use any high end colourist suite, so it's a good thing to learn.

Graeme

by the way your plug ins look great, and I really got a lot from your articles. Excellent and very thourough job too on those.

I think that one of the reasons I wanted to FT is because of what you just said. I'd like to get comfortable using a high powered interface such as FT.

thanks again. :)

Glenn - When you say the blur, are you talking about the Color Smoothing 4:1:1 filter?

Final Touch can blur the mask (when doing secondary color correction), which will help deal with noise in the image.

Ideally, you would do both of:
A- Upsampling the chroma, i.e. using Graeme's plugin (didn't know he finished them already).
Simple chroma interpolation is a lower quality version of this. I'm not sure if there's a big practical difference between the two methods (haven't really sat down and tried). I don't believe FT HD has chroma interpolation.
B- Blur the mask a little to help get rid of noise.


Blurring the mask can really help with video + compression noise. One disadvantage to FT HD is that sometimes the blur will blur "inwards". i.e. if you want to change the color of the sky, the correction will miss the area where the sky hits the horizon.
FCP's color correction is better at dealing with that situation. Although FCP's color corrector has an annoying interface, and the smoothing and edge thin options makes performance sub-real time.

Yes, finished them last month. The chroma stuff works really well too. I'm very happy with it.

Graeme

A few thoughts:

- CF2 is not available yet thought it was expected at last years NAB.
- CF1.5 will only input/output 8-bit RGB data in FCP as it functions as a AE plug in. Internal processing is 32 bit float though. This will not change in CF2 but there is now a standalone app that will work like Finaltouch does thru XML.
- Finaltouch needs you to export your project as XML. When I tested it there were problems with if I had nested stuff, and some layers. Straight cuts were fine. This was 8 months ago though. Some problems also occurred when I tried to update the final touch session with an updated XML (New cut from FCP)
- CF is flexible because it's a plugin inside FCP, Finaltouch has the upper hand on features and interface.

Thanks for the great points. I think I'm going to go with FinalTouch. If CF2 was out, then I'd probably go with that, but I think I'd like to learn FinalTouch. I talked with one of the people who works at Silicon Color and he said that FT and FCP talk very well together now. It's possible that they have done some upgrades, like you said, this was like 8 mos ago.