Digital Video - September 2007 - (Page 20)

reviews First Look: Apple Color Harnessing the power of Final Cut Studio’s latest app. above: Vignettes permit grading both inside and outside of the vignette area within a room, so eight rooms could actually equate to 16 layers of color grading. BY OLIVER PETERS T he biggest shock with the release of Apple’s Final Cut Studio 2 has been that Apple included Color in the bundle at a standard upgrade price. Color is a motion-picture-quality color-correction and grading application based on the FinalTouch technology acquired from Silicon Color. Up until IBC 2006 (prior to this acquisition), Silicon Color had marketed FinalTouch as a tiered product for SD, HD and 2K grading, topping out at a price in the thousands of dollars for the 2K version. By bundling Color with Final Cut Studio, Apple introduced many folks to this powerful application— potential users who might never have given it a second look under the FinalTouch banner. The last official versions of FinalTouch were pretty buggy—so how much were Apple engineers able to do in a few short months? Quite a lot. Color 1.0 is very stable if you stay within Apple’s recommended guidelines. Some issues, such as drop-frame sequence compatibility, have been fixed in the latest update (1.0.1), but others remain—so new users should consult Apple’s latest release notes for any potential gotchas in their particular workflows. Not all issues will apply, but some users in online forums still report problems with 720p at PAL frame rates and length limitations. For optimum performance, work in segments that are 10 minutes or less in length and include fewer than 200 edits. The interface The biggest complaint I hear in online forums is how daunting the Color interface is. This puzzles me, as it’s a rather simple and well-designed appli- cation. Granted, it isn’t very FCP-like, but it sports an interface similar to many Unix/Irix/Linux applications. If you have ever worked with Shake or a colorgrading application like da Vinci or Autodesk Lustre, you’ll feel right at home with Color. The interface color scheme uses a neutral grey background so as not to detract from the task at hand. It’s best to run Color with two screens, although the entire interface can fit on a single screen if your display card handles 1680x1050 pixels or greater. This means that you can run Color on a single-screen desktop system, a 17-inch MacBook Pro or even one of the higher-end 15-inch MacBook Pros with an external monitor. In a two-screen configuration, one screen displays the working interface while the other shows video and a variety of scopes. The video image can be toggled between full-screen or quarter-screen, though only HD clips will actually be quarter-screen on a 23-inch display. The working interface is arranged in a series of tabs. The left-to-right order of these tabs (called “rooms”) follows the same order as the video processing through Color. The first is Setup, which is where you define application preferences, render locations and so on. You also go here to see your shots as a list and to locate saved color grades. The rooms continue to the right, organized in the order of Primary In, Secondaries, Color FX, Primary Out and Geometry. As you grade a clip, you will work through these rooms in that same order. The last two rooms are Still Store and Render Queue. Saved reference images from the Still Store can be split-screened and compared with active clips for shot matching. 20 DV SEPTEMBER 2007 WWW.DV.COM http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - September 2007

Contents News AG-HPX500 HD Camcorder First Look: Color V8000HD 8" LCD Monitor Shoulder Mount System Instant Expert Close-Ups Fest Cercuit Q&A Flight Plan Cutter's Way Imagination in Action Motion Graphics Production Diary

Digital Video - September 2007

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