Re: Any IRIDAS Speedgrade users care to weigh in?

[David Cherniack] "Dynamic Linking with PrPro is clearly high on their Todo list."

I think that right there is the linchpin. Speedgrade needs a niche to fill.

If you're working exclusively in SD/HD, it's foolish not to at least have a copy of Resolve Lite installed on your system, if it can support it. And if you regularly work with 2K/4K source material, you're getting your money's worth out of a full Resolve setup (or Baselight, or Scratch, depending on the work you're doing). And the process for getting a PPro sequence into Resolve is remarkably similar to getting it into Speedgrade.

If you only need functional color correction for quick-turnaround workflows, Colorista, Color Finesse, or even the built-in 3-way are going to have you covered. No external CC necessary.

Speedgrade will be most useful when roundtripping a sequence or group of clips is as painless as roundtripping to After Effects. I think that's its niche, a full-functioning grading suite that integrates seamlessly into the Creative Suite "ecosystem." And it's not quite there yet.

Still, it's probably my favorite addition to the CS6 suite so far. I'm glad Adobe took the route of adding an external grading application. There's something very "Zen" about locking your picture and jumping into a dedicated grading suite. You're totally focused on the task at hand, not thinking about whether you still need to trim a few frames off that clip, or if the levels on that music could stand to be brought down a bit.

And you avoid the "drag-drop-copy-paste" operation inherent to internal effect-based color correction. Something that I find speeds up my work quite significantly.