Colorista vs Color Finesse, pros & cons

gunleik

gunleik

Well-known member
Hi.

Dl'ed the demo and played with it a little, but had to use it immediately, thus: No use.

But.
I think color finesse seems like such a better way to go.

But then there was some advantage to Colorista except for price - not immediatly easy to spot, after some initial playing with both.

Thoughts?

Gunleik
 
Power windows of Colorista is the big selling point for me.

But Color Finesse has Levels...which I also like.

However, I still use the 3-way. Gotten pretty good with it.
 
I've had the chance to use both and they each have their purpose. Neither of them are the perfect tool. I mean, how can we do color correction without channel blending? But I digress...

Color Finess is nice because it offers a wider range of tools than Colorist. You have secondary controls, curves, levels, soft clip settings, you can manually set where the shadows, midtones, and highlights are, etc. You can also work in CMYK if you like that approach. Personally, I find it to be worth less than it would appear but some people like it.

Colorista's main advanatage is speed. If you have a decent graphics card you can get real time primary color correction results. It also has masks known to some as power windows which allow you to isolate part of your correction to a specific area. It's not entirely useful in my opinion unless you use After Effects because it is otherwise impossible to motion track the masks which is more important than it might seem at first.

So...

Color Finesse:
- Notably greater number of controls
- Several color spaces in which to work (debatable utility)
- Several secondary corrections available.

Colorista:
- Real time grading with the right hardware
- 'Power Windows' (not trackable)
 
Isn't there a good chance Color Finesse will be integrated into the next version of FCP probably around NAB? Would you think that mask feature might be added as well.
 
Yep, Final Touch it was and it makes sense. Whatever Apple has in store for it's next software release is going to be big. We already know that Shake's successor is being built on the GPU accelerated Motion code base and with GPU accelerated color grading Apple is going to have some mighty powerful tools....

Which is why I find it so very strange that Apple only has 3 GPU options for its Mac Pro! I mean, crap, they're not even the best cards on the market!

EDIT:

you can motion track in colorista in FCP 5.1.2
Click to expand...

Really? When I asked Stu on his blog if Colorista provided motion tracking capabilities he replied with a definite no. He did say it was possible to bypass this by using the motion tracker built into After Effects but since FCP doesn't have a motion tracker.... Has the software been updated? Are you sure about this?
 
gunleik said:
Was it not "Final touch" that Apple bought./quote]

Yes, it was.

Well, darn it...if the power windows cannot track in FCP...that is a drawback. I hear that After Effects is a great application to color correct with, either with Colorista or Color Finesse, because the render engine is much better.

Need Automatic Duck Pro export though. ANOTHER $500

Shaw, where in Montana? I am from Missoula and points north (Ronan), and went to college in Bozeman.
Click to expand...
 
Thanks!

As to GPU accelleration... Will one gaine anything with more GPU's?
Shake has GPU accelleration of some of its nodes as it is, though, and (to stay on my own topic) some very sexy color tools that I'd love to see directly within FCP.

Gunleik
(waiting for the 8-core thingy to show up)
 
The 8 core thingy and the version of FCP with Final Touch integrated. And whatever new version of SHAKE is due out.
 
And it is also real time on a that same Mac in Premiere Pro in Windows under Boot Camp. C'mon Apple, help us help you!

-Stu
 
As to GPU accelleration... Will one gaine anything with more GPU's?
Click to expand...

Currently I don't believe there is software which can take advantage of more than one GPU. It's a rather tricky task since you can't share memory between them. It's possible but not yet implemented AFAIK.

Shaw, where in Montana? I am from Missoula and points north (Ronan), and went to college in Bozeman.
Click to expand...

Nice! I'm actually at MSU studying computer science at the moment. :) Can't say I'm from Montana really - my dad was born here but I was born in Alaska and spent most of my life in Colorado. Nice place though!
 
Shaw, I will be up there in April to talk to the Undergrads and the Grad students in the film program. I'll see if I can talk with Dennis Aig about getting you in, if you'd like. Or, barring that, we can try to meet up later and have a beer or something
 
Testing the editing in FCP/mastering in AE7 workflow but Colorista is very unstable on my system crashing AE7....
 
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