Controlling Apple's Color
From Mouse to the EclipseCX Control Surface
by Patrick Inhofer, Finisher-In-Chief,
Fini.tv
January 25, 2007
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Day 0 - Arrival
It's the Thursday morning after Christmas and the "gift" I bought myself finally arrives. I think about taking pictures of the box (and the unboxing) - but that seems way too fan-boy. I really should settle down. Instead I offer up a description:
The box is 5 feet tall. When I finally pull out the smaller box containing the Eclipse, the bigger box is filled with styrofoam peanuts - almost 4 feet deep. Ugh. It'll be a mess tossing those things out. I remove the Eclipse from its inner protective box. At least the peanuts worked, the panel itself is in great shape. It feels solid. Well engineered. I sit and play with it (my wife snickering as she walks by).
High quality shuttle/jog wheel
There are two sets of rotary knobs up top. They feel solid, spinning cleanly but not freely. The second set don't spin, but have slight detented clicks as you turn them. Everything here says professional. And finally, the trackballs also move easily - but with slight resistence. The contrast rings surrounding the trackballs feel very very firm. Too firm. But what do I know? I've never used one these things.
Missing a button
Overall, I'm very excited. I put it on the dining room table - and for the next few days my eyes linger for a few moments every time I walk by. I have a session that starts on January 2, so I'll go in the office on January 1 to set the panel up and familiarize myself with it. A great way to start off the New Year.
Day 1 - Setup
Traffic is a breeze getting into the city this morning. New York must be hung over from New Years Eve. I hope this bodes well for me.
Time for a smaller audio control surface
After launching Color I realize I'm in trouble.
Color isn't talking with the Eclipse. After a while I'm able to get JL Cooper's beta software to see the panel - but within Color? It's a no go. I remember a colorist telling me that Color natively communicates with the panels. Clearly I'm doing something wrong in setting up the customization software so I delete the preference files for the beta software. I relaunch Color. I program the IP address of the Eclipse from within Color (by this time I've changed the IP address a half-dozen times as I try to troubleshoot).
Success!
Speed is activated by the "M1" button
Two buttons have me confused: "speed++" and "Inch"
Since they're located above the transport control I'm assuming they throttle-up and throttle-down transport. A quick test shows that's the case.
Everything's working. It's getting past 6pm so I decide to wrap it up and hope I can start color correcting straight-away tomorrow.
Day 2 - Stuck in FCP
Dang. No Eclipse today.
This project has more speed changes than I've seen in years. Nearly half the shots in this 80 minute doc are fit-to-fills. This is almost always a no-no with Color. But the Release Notes to the new update to FCS2 (Color 1.0.2) state that Color now correctly handles constant speed changes. Well, this seems as good a time as any to test that theory out. But the variable speed changes will still have to be rendered and replaced. By the time I get this done (as well as a half-dozen other sundry issues) and create a neat textless timeline 6 hours have passed. We started at 2p. Time to wrap it.
Day 3 - Mouseless (sort of)
I'm in early. We have a tight deadline and render times are going to kill me. But first, I need to watch this show. And then it's starting to feel a lot like yesterday - more prep, no Color'ing - as I break the show into 3 Reels, and test the roundtrip for each reel. There are a few problems to fix (embedded Motion projects, mostly). By mid-afternoon I'm ready to rock and launch into Color to start color correcting.
The transport controls take some getting used to. Using the "Next / Previous" buttons, I can get ahead of the software and it doesn't take my commands. Better is: Press... pause a moment... Press... pause a moment. I think the keyboard is faster for those commands. Jog is much better than the keyboard. Especially with that "Speed++" button. I can quickly jog across several shots and get a nice sense of shot-to-shot balancing. Easier than dragging the mouse across the timeline. The "Inch" button doesn't seem that interesting to me. With Speed++ off the jog control feels just fine - I don't see a need to go into "Inch" mode. The shuttle control doesn't do anything. Guess I'll have to test that in FCP (one day).
Color correcting with the trackballs and contrast rings is different. Very different. I'm finding the controls feel too slow. I go into the Color preferences and change the sensitivity from 1 to 2. Better. I do wish the contrast rings had a separate sensitivity control. I'm finding that for big corrections I'm really spinning those rings. And the rings are machined pretty tight. By the end of the day I'm wondering if I like the rings at all.
At the top of the panel on the left side are where the "Advanced" controls in the Primary and Secondary rooms live. These are the Gain/Gamma/Lift for the individual RGB channels. Also, while in the Secondary room this is where you'll find controls for Masks and the HSL qualifiers. By the end of the day I'm still not used to quickly finding these controls, as they are listed with generic buttons labelled "Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, etc.." But when I do find the page I want, I find them much better than the mouse - mostly because I can tweak two of these controls at a time. Interestingly, you can also move the position of your masks using the left-most trackball. But man, do you have spin that trackball! Anyone remember Missile Command? That's what it feels like I have to do to make that mask move... spin, spin, SPIN.
One thing conspicuously missing - the Master Gamma/Gain/Lift controls are nowhere to be found. I think it's a mistake/bug because three of the rotary controls are blank on Page 1. I've got to think they're supposed to live there. Makes perfect sense, yes?
Using the Page buttons on the top right of the panel is a real boon. Each Page jumps to a specific room. Even better, they're clearly labeled by an LED display. Man is that faster than the mouse.
At the end of the day I remember what a colorist recently told me was his favorite feature of control panels, press play - then color correct in real-time with moving footage... and it works! Very very nice. But it's now the end of the day. Can't explore any further. I have gotten a decent amount of work done, even as I was learning this new tool. Considering I started color correcting a few hours later in the day than normal, I got done what I would normally get done in a full day while using the mouse.
Am I faster with the control surface? I'm not sure yet. I had a lot of material to get through and I wasn't spending as much time on each shot as I might normally do... it's a tight deadline.
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