Re: Welcome Bob Sliga to the Forum!

Hello Bob, hope you don't mind my questions, but you are the closest thing to the Apple Color Development team that I have access to, so I have to ask. I am also a film compositor using NUKE and I have graded with Scratch and Quantel. I have graded nation commercials, shorts and feature stuff using COLOR. I have made it work, its totally frustrating at times, but I get it done. I do find I have to go to NUKE or SHAKE for complicated shots which COLOR doesn't have the tools to deal with, but at the end of the day I get it done.

Here are some questions in order of annoyance for me.

1. KEY: Why only one HSL keyer, why not the ability to stack multiple keys together. I get into so many situations where one key is not enough. I end up doing lots of secondaries to try and control areas that would have been able to grade using one master key. It also gets unorganized as I have to click through lots of secondaries to see what I was affecting, since the ability to stack and add and subtract different keys would allow me to control everything I need with one Secondary. If I am doing complicated grades, I use all 8 secondaires everytime, then I have to figure out ways to backtrack if I want to effect other areas after my 8 grades are used.

2. ROTO: So I always have to use ROTO to limit my selections, but why are the rotos so primitive. You can't add points without opening them, then you can only add points to the end. Also their is no way to add or subtract rotos from each other. If I have a large shape of a head, I want to grade that skin tone, but not the eye area, I can't. I to get very elaborate and annoyingly complicated in my order of secondaries. Having a Rotoshape then having another one subtracted from that shape is mathematically very un-complicated.

3. STILL STORE: Ok, so why can't I manually slide my A/B line to where I want? Left/Right Top/Bottom? 50% either or. That is totally lame. I get into so many situations where I have to got back and forth finding the exact frame to park on to try and match a color on an object. This is time totally wasted, because if I had a manual A/B slider I could move the slider a little over and see what I need to see.

4. Caching/UI and Shortcuts.
Last gripe, I don't like how it can only cache using DPX files. I think the shortcuts are kinda few and far between and I don't like how a lot of options in the program can only be selected using the mouse and task bar.

Also the COLOR FX room should have these abilities, why can't apple take some of the shake code they are wasting away with and toss that into the COLOR FX room. Then give me the ability to export that as an Alpha to be used in one of my secondaries. Anyway I use COLOR Almost everyday and will continue to grade with it, since the world is bankrupt right now and high end gear is not an option anymore.

Anyway you are always hardest on the ones that have the most potential, COLOR has the most potential and I am going to be very critical of it until the developers make it the greatest.