[Patrick Inhofer] "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. "
I take care of this with by simply applying color labels to clips that require attention before sending to Color. All the Green clips in my timeline are speed changed for example. So all I have to do is look at the timeline and I can see all the clips that are speed changed and need to exported and reimported before going to Color. If there are a whole series of speed changed clips, I can just select all of them, paste them into a new timeline and export them as one clip, and then just use the Replace Edit command in FCP to replace the individual clips pretty quickly.
This requires effort on the operator's part to actually label the stuff, but if you do it as you insert the clips, then most of the searching work is done for you.
Yep, the workflow can be daunting, but if I can work with Good Eats in Final Touch, now Color, then I can work with pretty much anything in there. There's not much of anything that Final Touch / Color doesn't like that's not used in that show.
At the moment I've learned to accept the "issues" in Color in exchange for the quality of the end product this software brings to our final projects. My other editor is now using Color exclusively on a series of environmental stories that we never took into Color before because he's found it so easy to do the round trip. Over 40 news stories through Color this year already and I've delivered over 100 broadcast HD masters using Final Touch / Color since we started using it.
The way I look at it, color enhancement is not something I would have really considered in my shop prior to Final Touch. It has added another revenue stream to my facility at very little cost to me. When Apple re-branded it, I went from one license for $5,000 to three licenses for the upgrade cost of all three suites. For me, the end result from Color far outweigh the amount of work required to get a show into the application.
I personally will not consider any other high end color grading tool because it's not something that fits our business model and it would take me considerable time to get a return on investment since we don't run one dedicated color enhancement suite.
I would like to see Color add the ability to read still images / graphics in the timeline, Animation codec files and a limited amount of mixed formats in the same timeline. I understand that because of the way FCP itself creates slo-mo, that may be a hard feature to incorporate into Color, but it would be nice if Color supported that on the round trip too. I'm fine with all the codecs currently supported and don't see the need to add too many more to that list.
I guess we must be lucky in our shop because we rarely see many of the issues mentioned in this forum, but then we only work with very limited formats in Color as they seem to work the best. Namely uncompressed and ProRes.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
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