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A Case Against Color

By Scott Simmons   /   Jun 21, 2007
color.jpg When Apple demoed their new Final Cut Studio application Color at NAB 2007 there were ripples through the crowd and the online community that it would change the look of video programming as we know it since professional color grading would be available to everyone at a low price. The average production could now afford high-end color grading that was only possible on a professional dedicated system like a DaVinci or a fully outfitted Final Touch room, both with an experienced colorist to work the magic they had been trained to do. We have seen Apple revolutionize post before. Final Cut Pro made everyone an editor. DVD Studio Pro taught a large number of us to author DVDs when we had previously refused to learn. Final Cut Studio put the who post-production process in one box and caused whole post facilities to be built around the software package. There have been quite a few articles around the web on some of the bugs/issues/user experiences with Color. I have sat through several sessions on a Final Touch system and knew what to expect upon booting up Color for the first time. It looked pretty much the way I remembered it: a full featured, very powerful application. But Color just doesn’t seem to fit into the Final Cut Studio “mold”. One of the biggest successes of the Final Cut Studio applications (Final Cut Pro excluded) has been the ease in which you can accomplish tasks that would have taken a lot of time and a lot of steps before Apple’s implementation. Livetype gave us pre-animated fonts and text effects, Motion took that one step further with behaviors that can animate virtually anything. Soundtrack Pro gave us an easy way in which a picture editor could clean up a variety of audio problems with minimal effort. Using DVD StudioPro’s templates and pre-built buttons took DVD authoring a step above the “all or nothing” template mentality of iDVD and made customized DVDs easy to create with a minimum of effort. Compressor has presets for almost all formats one might need. And the interfaces amongst all these applications is somewhat consistent with Apple’s design. Then comes Color. The interface was obviously not designed by Apple and has a much more specialized feel, not unlike that of Shake. Aside from the included preset looks that are applied via an effects tree there’s nothing really simple or automated about Color that puts it in line with the other FCS applications that “support” Final Cut Pro. The import and export from a FCP sequence has been simplified from the Silicon Color days so that is welcome. While this post is titled “A Case Against Color” I really like the idea behind the application. Despite those bugs/issues that have been mentioned Color can do a fantastic job doing what is was designed to do; color correction and color grading. It seems like what might have been a more logical path for the application formerly known as Final Touch might have been the Shake approach to Apple software acquisition. Shake got some tweaks to integrate it with Final Cut Pro but it has largely remained its own separate product. The biggest change to Shake came in its huge price drop. Now the rumor is that Shake might be discontinued for a totally new app. It doesn’t seem that Color would follow this same path since it was integrated into FCS from the beginning. What might have been the best path for Color? IMHO, how about a scaled down color correction application with good (and easy) primary and secondary correction, a few nice preset looks and the ability to apply selective correction via some sort of drawing tool. Put that in a speedy interface and develop some new method for applying these color changes (after all, haven’t most FCS applications included easy and new methods for getting their specific job done) and you have another great Final Cut Studio application that fits into the Final Cut Studio mold. Then sell the much more full featured version of Color along side Shake. But even this path would neglect to provide the one thing that allows for the best color correction and color grading. That would be the professional colorist and the years of experience and colorist eye that he/she can bring to the table.

10 Comments

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  • http://www.capria.tv Frank Capria

    I couldn’t agree more with your take. Color takes a lot more effort to get up to speed on than the other elements of FCS.

    Within minutes I was able to create usable titles with LiveType, and animate some stills nicely in Motion. In Color it took much longer just to replicate what I was able to accomplish using 3-way color correction within FCP. And that’s the rub. We still have the 3-way color corrector crutch.

    Color is more like FCP than the other apps you mention. It’s extremely powerful and has a significant learning curve. It might take years of experience to become a truly good colorist, but with Color it only takes a couple of projects to get back to where you were with the 3-way color corrector.

    My biggest issue — no audio!

  • Allan S.

    I love what you can do with color, it gives FCP a level of colour correction that surpases Sympony.

    Is it buggy, yes, but then so was FCP 1, 2, 3… but then all software is buggy. You just have to figure out which tires you need to kick in what order to get it to work right. If I had paid the $25K for Final Touch and it was this buggy I would be pissed, but its essentially free with the upgrade and I’m happy to use it. All technical issues asside it allows me to make my shows look better and that is what it boils down to for me.

    Not everything should be easy to use, Photoshop is not an easy program, After Effects is not an easy program. You can do basic things easily if you have some knowledge but the truly fantastic things you can do with those programs requires, skill, experience and a certain amount of artistry. If you want the one click make it look goodish button use the 3 way. If you want a colour correcter that has the depth of color, well read the manual and spend some quality time working with it. Before you know it you’ll actually understand the application, but it requires some comitment from the user, which I don’t see as a bad thing. Once you have that down then you can work on the artistry and never forget that colour correction is a technical artform and Color is just one of the many tools, finally available to everyone at a reasonable price.

    If you need realtime, buy a Lustre or Baselight among others. Me I’ll keep my $150K, and use color and get better results than I was. It might not be a perfect application yet but its better than what I had before.

    Would I use Color if I had a client sitting over my shoulder who I was charging $900/hr to correct their show, no. In 3-5 years when all the bugs are worked out sure, but that isn’t what I do. I just want my weekly lower end TV show to look better and Color more than fits the bill.

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  • http://www.hdforindies.com Mike Curtis

    I agree that one should carefully study whether to use/commit to Color – the learning curve is definitely steep compared to the ease of the canned stuff in the other apps as the writer discusses.

    One thing I haven’t seen mentioned as much, however, is the amount of prep required to get a timeline to go smoothly in and out of Color to really use it the way it was intended.

    As for branching it out to a simple and higher end product – there simply was no time to do that for this release cycle – they bought it what – 6 or so months ago? Not enough time for a heavy duty re-write.

    As for the wisdom of the split level approach – I had expected to see some of the power of Color get folded into Final Touch, but that didn’t happen. For, now, the standalone app is the only practical option to get it on the market in this timeframe.

    For the future, if they did the high/low split, it would be even more developer effort, and the high end product would have to be priced accordingly, but the coding effort would not have changed – they’d need to do just as much work, now with a smaller user base, so less funds to develop perhaps – hence slower progress and feature assimilation.

    By committing (for now) to the “everybody gets it all” approach, there are definitely teething pains – the app still isn’t ready for Joe FCP User to sit down and go on it, it really is a high end thoroughbred app that needs some babying and proper prep…otherwise it gets cranky in various ways.

    If they were maintain it as a standalone, but incorporate more of those features into FCP over time (realtime secondaries, node tree, etc.), wouldn’t that suffice? And keep the full version folded in? The colorist specific things – the grey backgrounds, the separate rooms, the still store and those controls, the saved look management….those benefit from a dedicated interface. But I’d love to see that merged into something that just works as a mode in FCP, working with the native timeline stuff, rather than transporting it all to the separate app. Perhaps next year, when they’ve had time to incorporate.

    -mike

  • Giorgio Malfitano

    As an experienced colorist and editor, I would say that Color
    appears to be a powerful addition to FCP, I am inclined to buy
    it, whatever it’s shortcomings. For example, on the daVinci you
    use a variety of “Power Windows” to segment luminance or
    chrominance to enhance the picture. You can take really dull
    lighting and make it more vibrant. I suppose you can take After
    Effects and reproduce the same effect, but it would be more
    economical to have it in Color.
    Second, there are colorists and there are colorists. Commercialcoloring is not that hard, or demanding and the same can be said of high end features. It is the ability to “work the room” of ad people or movie people, and not necessarily a high degree of technical knowledge or artistic ability.
    What is really going to be required in the future with the advent
    of Red and Silicon Imaging is “color recreation”: the technical
    ability to recreate color with very little clues as to what that
    color is. That requires artistic imagination. Or a library of
    digital stills. So Color is going to be part of the future. Unlimited
    access to a powerful device = CHEAP! Best – giorgio.

  • Olm

    So you are saying don’t user Color in a pro project because it has too many controls? I use the Color autobalance all the time and welcome the extra control when I need it.

    “But even this path would neglect to provide the one thing that allows for the best color correction and color grading. That would be the professional colorist and the years of experience and colorist eye that he/she can bring to the table.”

    Huh?

    Don’t use Color because there is no colorist included or do you want Apple to send you a colorist? I don’t get your point.

  • http://www.scottsimmons.tv/blog Scott

    Olm, I’m not saying don’t use Color. I just wrote about my feelings that is seems Color doesn’t fit in with the FCS suite. It’s all in the post. As for the last statement, I’m saying that nothing can compare to a real, experienced colorist. One might be a whiz at the Color controls but without the years of experience working with all aspects of color correction and color grading I would rather have an experienced colorist with FCP’s 3-way filter than someone who knew the buttons of Color but not the art of color grading. It’s like audio mix and sound design. I can do it all day long with Soundtrack Pro but would never consider myself better an an experienced audio person who has years behind the board. I’m saying the tools are great but it’s the experience and talent that make the real difference.

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  • http://www.5thdistrictskate.com chris shenton

    i just used color for a music video project. learnt how to work it in one night. i don’t consider myself a colorist, but sitting in a spirit and flame room watching “the master at work” i have some experience what it’s about and what it takes. color is very powerful. not 100% stable yet and maybe some interface polishing needed, but it sure raises the looks of your projects! of course – as long as apple doesn’t make it a “template and one-click” app, it needs some effort and adaptation to get into it. but hey, wo said video post production was easy? timeline preparation and stripping is just as necessary when you work with flame or spirit. a big high five to apple for integrating this app into the suite!

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