My kingdom for a histogram!!!

DavidBeier

DavidBeier

Veteran
I'm currently working in Avid Xpress Pro HD 5.23. I'm also well trained in Discreet Combustion. One thing I absolutly love about Combustion is the histogram since it lets me clip my highs, lows, and set my mid tone all individually. I love having all the luminance values mapped out and being able to control them seperatly. Unfortunatly, it appears Avid doesn't have a similar option in it's color correction (a histogram can apparently be displayed but not altered). Is there anything that can give me the kind of control I want in Avid Xpress Pro HD? It's a more expensive program than Combustion and it'll be a real pain to export every shot back and forth for complex CC.
 
I'm afraid, there isn't such a tool in Avid Xpress. The curves, however, in my opinion, provide more control than a Histogram view can.

You may want to go with a seperate CC plugin or an outside solution eventually anyway though. Unless you have external monitoring, it's quite hard to judge colours looking at the three tiny CC monitors in Avid. The curve boxes, too, aren't that big, and it's easy to clamp the colours and achieve undesired solarization without even noticing it until the final render.
 
What would you suggest. As I said, I know Discreet Combustion and love its controls but the idea of exporting an entire movie to it (when I can't carry sound and rendering takes so long) is a bit disconcerting. Is there any affordible but powerful CC plugins you can reccommend?
 
You don't have to render the movie. You can render your film into a QuickTime Reference file, which basically creates an empty container which links to the video and audio data of the original Avid OMFI files. Rendering sequences takes seconds that way. Of course you're presented with a problem of having to seperate the shots afterwards. It would be nice if all the cuts in Avid were exported as seperate reference files which could then be easily one by one corrected in the software of your choice, but for now I just manually seperate the shots using QuickTime Pro's trim functions, and then export them into seperate reference files once again. If someone knows a faster way I'd be happy to give My kingdom for that information. Of course, the problem also becomes that you have to then reimport the files back into Avid, and without the bloody Mojo you can only re-encode the files back into either DV25, 50, or the Avid HD codecs if you have an HD project.

As to the plugins, I haven't used any but as far as I know there is a version of Color Finesse for Avid.

I personally like the tools of Shake for colour so that's what I use. So far most of my films needed work on almost every shot anyway.
 
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