ViXen Pro

[Stephen Finton]

Is this plug-in worth the money? I emailed their site thinking they would not respond but got a message back saying they were revamping their registration process. Should I wait?

[Glenn Chan]

What host program are you going to use? (i.e. After Effects, Avid, FCP, etc.)

2- Regardless, your best bets for color correction are probably (in my order of preference):

PC:
#1 - Sony Vegas + 3rd party film look for ideas

Mac:
#2 - FCP + Nattress Film Effects
#3 - FCP + Final Touch (I would lean towards Nattress, even if it were more expensive)

#4 - Combustion or After Effects + Color Finesse + Automatic Duck

[Matt Brabender]

I was just about to post a question in regards to CC's, so I'll slot it in here.
Glen you have kind of answered my question.

What is the best colour correction / grading software available for the PC? - that doesn't need hardware?

I'm well impressed by the Sony Vegas tools, but was hoping there would be something with a few extra features like the symphony nitris has (such as the adjustable luma range where you can actually see the highs, mids and shadows).

I was also under the impression that vegas runs at 8bit where colour finesse and combustion run at floating 32bit. Does this make a big difference? Does it make a difference with dv25 material?

[Glenn Chan]

Vegas doesn't have adjustible highs, mids, and shadows. I never use it, but this might be because Vegas doesn't have it.

Vegas does have a secondary color correction, which lets you precisely define a luminance range.

The color corrector in Vegas is actually slightly off (try it on a mis-balanced shot of a black and white picture)... I haven't looked closely at other programs.

2- Vegas does render 8-bit from filter to filter (directshow limitation I believe). This usually isn't a problem as you can be careful and make sure you condense your filters. Your video already probably has video noise in it, and this provides natural dithering.

Render-induced rounding error is only a problem when you have 2 or more filters... I think I've only seen banding crop up in Vegas once.

The filters themselves may create banding themselves. The gradient map in Vegas does this on occasion.

Final Touch's blurs have banding in them.

So generally the rounding error you get between filters is blown out of proportion. Other things are more likely to give you problems.

What is the best colour correction / grading software available for the PC?

Also check out Lustre and Nucoda ;) (Ok so both are pretty expensive.)

Iridas is another. Actually you can get the demo for Iridas. I don't see windowing/masking in Iridas so I havent really played with it.

2- Anyways, all the programs have tools that other programs don't necessarily have.

Vegas has unsharp mask, which a lot of other programs don't necessarily have. It doesn't have motion tracking.

The interface wasn't designed for color correction, so some things are annoying in it. The shortcut keys aren't obvious, but will help a lot. The composite mode can emulate node-based systems and masking/power windows, except clunkier because everything is in layers.

[Matt Brabender]

Thanks Glen - lustre looks very nice indeed

[Stephen Finton]

I wasn't really going to get ViXen for color correction. I was more interested in its de-noising capabilities.

[Glenn Chan]

You might want to try the free stuff first? Virtualdub has a bunch of denoising filters... MSU comes to mind. It's alright.

For really good de-noising on a budget, you could try exporting an image sequence for batch processing in Photoshop by Noise Ninja. The workflow is absolutely terrible, but it does beat MSU hands down.