By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, November 26, 2007 - 6:31:00

http://www.apple.com//finalcutstudio/color/
Score:

Color is Apple’s newest addition to the Final Cut “Pro” software suite. Color is a professional video and film grading and manipulation tool. It is an environment with the look and feel of Shake, with different “rooms”. Color can colour correct video and film projects coming from Final Cut Pro or an EDL (Edit Decision List) for another editing environment. Control surfaces from JLCooper and Tangent Devices are compatible with Color.

Colour correcting is not the only trick up Color’s sleeve; you can also create colour effects with a node-based system, pan and scan effects, and apply colour effects to restricted --and if needed, moving-- zones in a project. I tested Color after having tried most of its features a couple of times. Color isn’t easy when you first start using it, but it rapidly grows on you.

Before you can use Color on a Leopard system without problems, you will have to turn off Spaces or change the short cut keys. The Dashboard buttons on your mouse can better be disabled. A three-button mouse is necessary, but even then, some buttons won’t work as explained in the manual. The manual contains some rather awkward errors. For example, to change a keyframe, the manual insists on you using the Control-0 key combination. This combination actually removes your keyframe (!). The correct combination was control-8.

Apple acquired Silicon Color back in 2006. The Color application that today is part of Final Cut Studio 2 is a first “Apple-ised” version of that application. Color is designed to run on one video card with two DVI-out ports, plus an 3495 USD AJA SDI-out port. I ran Color on a two monitor Power Mac G5 1.8GHz dual processor machine with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Special Edition video card, and a Mac Pro 3GHz with the same two monitors, but driven by an ATI X1900 XT card. Both configurations performed well. The Mac Pro handled the processing faster, but that is to be expected. For an application of this status, I found Color to perform quite snappy.

Color In Rooms

Color is divided in rooms. Given the fact that you can colour-correct a complete shot or even video or film, or that you can choose to create some dramatic or subtle colour effects on parts of the image, it seems logical to have at least different interfaces for these different tasks. In Color, global colour adjustments are made in the Primary In and Primary Out rooms. The Secondaries in, Geometry and Color FX rooms serve as environments where you can perform local colour adjustments.

The Still Store and Setup rooms are two rooms that seem to be disconnected from the rest of the interface. The Still Store is where you keep your stills taken from the footage that you’re editing in Color. The Setup room is in my opinion, an oddball. It contains various elements, such as your application-wide preferences, your project settings, but also some project folders. It is the only room that I found to be mildly illogical.

For the larger part of the application, however, Color has a surprisingly logical layout. Colour adjustments are made using a full range of controls, including colour wheels, colour, luma, chroma, and hue sliders, and a full range of curves. Colour adjustments can and should be done by the numbers, and to see how that works out, there’s also a full range of colour or video scopes, including a 3D colour space viewer, and the regular video scopes also found in Final Cut Pro. Color’s scopes are more powerful, and also offer some interactive functionality, such as the selection of areas in a shot based on selections with a colour or hue picker.

In fact, as soon as you’ve gone through the manual --but as a beginner, you definitely should read the manual-- a lot of Color’s controls and workflow become quite easy to grasp and apply. 

Same Workflow as With SoundTrack Pro or Motion

Color may now be part of Final Cut Studio 2, but that doesn’t mean Apple has stringently removed all reminiscence of the program’s past power with regards to importing and managing media. The way you get media into Color is not by opening a QuickTime file, though. You can send a Final Cut Pro project to Color, where the footage will be shown in a preview panel, and the shots in a timeline. However, if your project originates from one of Final Cut’s competing products, it can be imported into Color too, as long as the originating application knows about EDLs.

Very important is the ability to import and export Cineon and DPX Image Sequences --I didn’t have the chance to test those capabilities.

Color follows the same workflow as SoundTrack Pro and Mtion in Final Cut Studio 2. You Send a project to Color, and when you’ve finished editing and rendering the footage, you can send it back to Final Cut Pro, where you will find the edited sequence as a new sequence in the asset bin. If during a Color editing session the Final Cut Pro assets changed, you can re-conform the Color project automatically, which I can safely say, saves a lot of time.

Codecs that Color understands, include all the QuickTime codecs and AJA Kona codecs if you have this hardware installed on your system, and the codecs properly downloaded from the AJA web site and correctly installed. I wasn’t able to test the AJA functionality, but I’m sure it will work as good as the QuickTime codec support. For importing image sequences, Color knows Cineon, JPEG, TIFF, JPEG 2000, and DPX.