jPo,
I hear you brother!
OTOneH, Color completely reinvigorated my career. Color correction with the 3WCC or Colorista is fine. Color allows us to go so far beyond that. I love nothing more than having a wary DP turn into my best friend after 2 hours in a Color session.
OTOtherH, the workflow is a complete nightmare. If the next release of FCS doesn't significantly address these issues I'm going to start looking at alternate solutions. I've just spent 2 FULL DAYS prepping an admittingly complex timeline. I've got to hunt and peck for every format, frame rate, filter, motion effect. Sure there are tools to help us FIND these things but almost nothing to help us MANIPULATE and control these things en masse.
Then there are the XMLs that FCP can't even round-trip to itself (simple Export followed by import results in a dozen error messages but no way to find those clips in a painless manner), much less through Color or some other 3rd party app.
Where all these "Studio" solutions fail is in their cobbled togetherness. One of the the "A's" needs to step up and completely redefine their solutions into being a TIMELINE around which the interface changes. We should have a single app, with a single timeline, and depending on our mission the interface mutates around it.
Anyway - you found me at a good/bad time. I'm in here on a Saturday to make up for the 2 days I lost prepping a complex timeline that was really decently cleaned up by the client. It's not like they screwed up - it's just the Promised Land of a multiformat timeline has become a Fool's Gold because no one thought to give us the tools to manage that complexity. Well, at least with FCS3 they won't be able to say they didn't have 2 years to figure it out (and counting).
- pi, getting down to finally color correcting, but thinking long term
Patrick Inhofer
Finisher-in-Chief
Fini, nyc
