Category: Tools
Stu Maschwitz on the ProLost blog today points to a filmmaker who used both Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks to finish an entire feature. The film is Wasting Away and has won numerous awards on the film festival circuit. The filmmaker, John Waters Flowers, has posted a nicely detailed explanation on how he used Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks to streamline his workflow and turn the film around in 10 days. One reason I’m writing about it here is some comments John has made in his opening paragraphs about why he chose not to use Color:
“Because of the tight deadline, Apple Color was not a viable solution. The film had been shot on a Viper FilmStream Camera, which gives footage a strange kind of greenish tint, and Color was taking way too long to export footage after color correction had been applied. We needed a solution which allowed us to try different looks, iterate very quickly through them, then export the footage from Final Cut Studio at full resolution once color correction was applied.”
He had 10 days to finish this show – which doesn’t seem like a particularly rushed deadline to me. Although from the picture of his edit room accompanying this post I infer that the color correction in Color would have been driven by a mouse, rather than a control surface. I’ve found the control surface easily doubles my productivity (you can read my initial experience here). So a 90 minute feature color corrected with a mouse could easily take 5 working days… just for the initial grade. And that’s without even getting into establishing a look. And look creation in Color is an exercise in patience + fortitude + luck, as his Producers seemed to have discovered:
“In late 2007, I worked with Sean and Matthew Kohnen to provide Color Correction on the film Wasting Away. The film had already been graded in Apple’s Color (formerly “Final Touch”) but the color just wasn’t what they wanted.”
Without talking to anyone involved in the production, I suspect they tried to use the ColorFX room in Color. They probably found it both slow to render and inflexible. If I were them, I wouldn’t want to tread over the same ground again either. And so John’s decision to give the Colorista / Magic Bullet Looks isn’t just reasonable, it was smart. In my review of Looks I wrote:
“I offer this up as my highest praise: In many respects, I wish Looks was the ColorFX room in Color.”
I still stand by that assessment. In fact, my preferred workflow today is to color correct in Color to set the initial grade and then move into Looks to stylize the image. Setting the base grade, whether in Color or FCP is important. Once you’ve graded an entire scene and all the shots match, applying Looks on top of it helps increase the likelihood that the look you’ve developed will apply consistently across those shots – minimizing the need for time consuming tweaking and re-rendering.
Why Color over Colorista? In two words: Secondary Rooms. The ability to mask/isolate multiple areas of an image really help us sculpt an image. In fact, you could say that one of the main themes of the new excellent book by Steve Hullfish The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction
And while you could do the same thing with multiple layers of Colorista or FCP’s built-in 3-Way Color Corrector – it’s nowhere near as fast and flexible.
But here’s the thing that got me really intrigued and why I’m writing about this today… (from Stu’s blog)
So if you read Flowers’s excellent article and see his screenshots and ask yourself, “Is Stu listening? Does he realize that filmmakers want powerful and easy-to-use color correction tools that turn their NLE into a proper finishing tool? And that they’re already using Magic Bullet for this, despite his intentions?”Well rest assured, the answer is yes.
If Stu adds control surface support and healthy secondary controls in his Color-killer – I’ll be his bestest friend for life. Oh. And yes. I’ll buy the software.
I like Color for it’s ability to help me take the craft to a higher level. I curse Color for its idiosyncrasies that do nothing but inhibit our ability to be assured that the timeline we feed it is the timeline it returns to us. Not to mention the (not so) little bug that kills many interlaced workflows.
- pi
This post is a shameless plug for a great workshop being held in NYC on Saturday May 17th. If you know anyone who might be interested in the following, please forward them any of the URLs listed below.
One of the hot workflow topics these days is “tapeless acquisition”. Whether it be P2 cards for your HVX-200 or those little SD cards for a Red camera, managing that data while on-set has become a valuable asset. Frequently called the “Data Wrangler”, the person who manages the off-loading, verification and subsequent re-initializing of these cards is a position of tremendous responsibility. Given that it’s a relatively new crew assignment, training opportunities are few and far between – while the stakes in getting it wrong can be hazardous to one’s career development.
If you live in New York City metro area, next Saturday May 17th The Moving Pictures Collective (Mopictive) is offering a Tapeless Acquisition Workshop. By the end of the day you’ll walk away with a system for data management that can be applied to any tapeless shoot. It’s being taught by Michael Vitti – the Fearless Leader of Mopictive who has extensive experience with “data wrangling” – and Jamie Hitchings – an Apple Certified instructor – who will walk the attendees through the entire Log & Capture process. Special Guest is a great guy I’ve known for many years, Michael Woodworth of Divergent Media, developer of the software app, ScopeBox. He’ll be talking up scopes (how read them, how to use them, and why you need them) and monitors – a great ancillary skill for anyone who’s trying to break in onto the set.
Here’s the rub – signups have been light. If a few more people don’t get signed up before next Tuesday or Wed, the event will be cancelled. Keep in mind, class size is limited to 10 people. This is nearly a one-on-one workshop. You’ll have full access to the instructors and plenty of time to get all your questions answered. You’ll learn the theory which can be applied to any tapeless situation as well as practical applications that’ll allow to immediate implementation of that theory.
You can find out more details about the workshop here.
You can sign up here. Price is $300.
Full Disclosure: I am the Treasurer of Mopictive (which is a DBA of the New York Final Cut Users Group and also a certified NYS 501c3 not-for-profit). Over 50% of the proceeds will go to Mopicitive and furthering its mission to the training of Digital Storytellers.
My review of the EclipseCX is now posted to this website. You can read it here. I’m just now sending it to Ken Stone, on whose terrific FCP Resource site it’ll also be posted (for wider circulation).
It’s written in a diary format, since I found that my perception of the device changed as I used it and became more proficient on it. I think it’ll help mouse-driven Color’ists better understand what the transition to the control surface was like.
I’ve got a few blog postings on Color workflow that have been bottled up as I was focused on (1) working on paid jobs and (2) writing the review.
- pi
Over the holidays the JL Cooper Eclipse CX arrived. I hooked it up the day before starting a 75 minute doc and have been pounding on it for several days. I promised the guys at JL Cooper a review to be posted online (they gave me a good price) and I’ll be doing that. I have another job coming in next week. After that wraps I’ll post all the gory details.
I’m going to do it as a running diary, so those considering making the switch from mouse to control surface get an idea of how my transition went.
In the meantime I will say this: Productivity is going through the roof!
- pi
I’ve been a long time owner of the Magic Bullet filters. Originally – back in 2002 – I bought it to emulate the 24p “Look” for a job. Even then, I’ve never been enamored with post-processing 29.97fps to 24p. I’ve found most filmmakers use it as a crutch. As if it were some sort of… magic bullet. I’d much rather filmmakers forget about frame rate and focus more on framing, lighting, and exposure. Those elements get you far more production value than simply emulating 24p.
But times, they are a-changing. True 24p cameras are affordable and available. With some forethought these cameras mitigate much of the need for 24p emulation (yay!).
Far more in demand is the ability to create the ever elusive “Look”. Whether for a flashback, dream sequence, historical recreation, emotional impact, stock emulation, or mimicking an in-camera technique (diffusion) – coming up with some “Look” (always – one which nobody has ever seen before) is a frequent request. The Magic Bullet Looks subset of filters has always been a stand-by of mine – though, unfortunately, it stands-by a bit more than I would have preferred.
Why? It suffered from having to work within the Final Cut Pro (or After Effect) filter User Interface.
The Looks Suite consisted of long run-on lists of numerical entry boxes and sliders. It’s like trying to color correct with the 3 Way Color Corrector’s numerical rather than graphical interface; it’s powerful, but it gets old fast…
..and that sums up how I’ve long felt about the older Magic Bullet Editors package. Powerful, but it gets old fast.
In mid-October Red Giant Software released Magic Bullet Looks. It’s an upgrade for Magic Bullet Editors – and my first impression was, “Wow. Sexy”.
My second impression: This is easily the best-looking, best-feeling interface I’ve seen… anywhere. It’s fast. It’s responsive. And best of all – the 100+ Look presets all update to show you a preview using the current frame you’ve got loaded! What a time-saver.
The point of the presets isn’t to just apply it and move on (you know who you are) – but to use it as a starting point. With the new Magic Bullet Looks, if a client asks for a contrasty diffuse look – I can open the presets tab, reveal the Diffusion presets, and by looking at the small thumbnail pick the preset that seems to get me closest to the desired look. Once applied, I can start tweaking until I dial-in a pleasing result.
In comparison, the ColorFX room in Apple’s Color makes much of the same promise as Looks. It has a bunch of prebuilt presets. But the thumbnails provide zero insight into how any particular preset might react with the current image (unless my image is a low-angle shot of the Golden Gate B
ridge). Either I’ve got to go through and apply every preset to find my jumping-off point, or I’ll just start from scratch.
I offer this up as my highest praise: In many respects, I wish Looks was the ColorFX room in Color. The nodal approach that Color uses to creating a look is very powerful but very unintuitive. To be fair, Looks doesn’t have the kind of repair (RGB split), grain management, and math tools of the ColorFX room. But the Color interface doesn’t try to help me along as Looks does. MB Looks has a nifty help feature that describes every filter I can apply as I hover my mouse over the filter. Unfortunately, the help text is unhelpfully located at the polar opposite end of the screen from where my mouse is hovering. The font size of the help text also assumes I’ve got my 20-something set of eyeballs. Us “experienced” folk need a little more help than that, please.
Another shortcoming of Looks is that as I’m working on a Look, I can’t see it output to my external monitor. I’m finding color decisions I make within Looks have to be tweaked once I press the “Apply” button and my monitor updates to show me what’s really happening with the image. I don’t think I can blame the Red Giant folks, I believe this is a limitation of the Final Cut plug-in architecture. Color Finesse suffers from the same problem when used as an FCP plug-in.
Lastly, it’s clear that much thought went into assisting us in designing a look. Looks uses a Subject / Matte Box / Lens / Camera / Post metaphor, guiding a filmmaker in deciding what effects to apply in what order.
For a more general audience I think this is fine. But I would like to be able to toggle into a PowerUser mode that doesn’t restrict me from placing filters that exclusively belong to the Camera elsewhere in the chain. At times, I felt more restricted that I should have been. I understand the metaphor / paradigm that Looks is using and that much of its target audience is actually freed by following this logical workflow. Still, I’d like the opportunity to be freed from the shackles of reality when creating unreal or hyper-real looks.
Overall, Looks is a fantastic product. There are a dozen nice little interface elements I haven’t mentioned that really speed up user interaction. It’s an amazing upgrade for anyone who owns the previous version of Magic Bullet Looks. And if you find yourself constantly trying to implement specialty looks, it’s worth the full purchase price. I hope Apple’s Pro Apps team takes a close look at this software… while it’s missing some of the power features I’d like to see (flexible re-ordering of filters), it has a certain “fun-factor” missing from much of today’s professional apps. And the rendered results look great.
Be sure to check out the blog of the creator of Magic Bullet Looks. There’s a secret feature that I haven’t gotten into that’s very nifty.
You can download a demo here.
- pi
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