Littel Frog in High Def by Shane Ross

When I first started color correcting in FCP I used the built in 3-way color corrector.  When it first was introduced in FCP 3, it is what first drew me to FCP.  And I have been able to do quite a bit with it.  But when Magic Bullet Colorista by Red Giant Software came out, and I was able to push the colors further than the 3-way…take things more to the extreme.  And lately, while I have been glued to COLOR, there are many instances when I can’t use it.  Such as times when I have projects with mixed formats, and no time to conform everything to one format.  It happens more often than I’d like.

Such was the case on a recent project I was slated to online.  And when you are the online editor, handed the project only when picture has locked, you don’t have the luxury of getting everything converted to a uniform codec for editing.  Editors often do what they want, and if it works, they keep doing it.  This project was mainly DVCPRO HD from P2, but also had a lot of stock footage, in many formats…DV, DV50, Photo JPEG (SD and HD) and ProRes.  All on a DVCPRO HD timeline.  And as most of the projects I work on lately, it was a LOW low budget project, and I only had 2 days to color correct it.  Given that time constraint, I didn’t have time to convert all the footage to DVCPRO HD, or ProRes, so that I could take it into COLOR and do my work there.  I did have a lot of converting to do to get frame rates to match, and that was already eating into my allotted time.

Because of this, I opted to go with Colorista…because I feel limited by the 3-way color corrector, and I really like the ability to use SECONDARIES in Colorista.  But now I was psyched because a NEW version of Colorista was released, Colorista 2, and with this, many new improvements.  I still had the great control and ability to push colors as much as I can do with COLOR, and I still have access to the easy to use Secondaries that allow me to target color correction, or create vignettes…but now I have access to a great thing called the HSL KEY, and other small improvements. read more...