[pom_boarder] "I was curious to know whether you or anyone had tried a grade in color and found it noisier than comparable grades within FCP?"
Nope, in fact the FCP 3-Way is much noisier in my opinion than Final Touch or Color. I have to be extremely careful when grading with the 3-Way as it goes into some bad compression / noise in a hurry.
Magic Bullet's Colorista gives me outstanding results in FCP with far less noise. We can pretty duplicate Color right in FCP using Colorista.
Color handles DVCPro HD noise extremely well and it all depends on the project and delivery on whether or not you try to do any noise reduction for the format. Low light shots, absolutely. Everything else, you just have to weigh the shot vs. the noise vs. the render time.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
http://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.
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