HD For Indies

UPDATE 1:30am Thursday: OK, I got some stuff wrong in this article: it CAN handle log footage, it DOES use both CPU and GPU, I was kinda harsh on the guy about it (was grumpy when I wrote it), and the XML handoff according to them does maintain all your other layer elements when going back to FCP. He's reluctant to loan me an evaluation copy (it's hardware dongle protected), but I'm working on it. See my other post about to go up for further info. Also, READ THE COMMENTS at the bottom of this article - there's a little green line that will say "Posted by: Mike / 1:33 AM (5) comments" So read the comments, the developers wrote in to correct some of my mistakes.

Silicon Color announced that Final Touch HD has shipped at MWSF after being announced at Siggraph. Here are some pictures of the UI (at the end of the page). Unfortunately, my carefully written notes didn't show up on the .Mac page.

It's the most interesting product I've seen at the show so far.

It will do realtime color correction of HD footage with multiple color correction effects,

-it will handle 10 bit footage

-all color correction is done in 32 bit per CHANNEL color space (floating point color correction)

-all color correction is done in RGB

-it can work with proxy files for lower throughput drive systems.

-you can have tracked soft matted color corrections with feathered color vignettes, primary and secondary color correction, and gaussian blur...ALL IN REAL TIME.

This sounds very similar to what Nucoda is doing on the PC side...but this is just $5000 instead of circa $100,000.

How It Works:

I sat down with Roland Wood, president and founder of the company, to hear how it all gets done. If I get any of this wrong, it's my own fault.

Say you've finished your editorial work in Final Cut Pro HD, using DVCPRO HD as an offline codec. You haven't color corrected so far.

Now you're ready for serious color correction.

Recapture from tape (or relink if elsewhere on disk) to your best quality source - 10 bit instead of 8 bit if you can.

Export XML from Final Cut Pro HD.

Go to Final Touch HD, the $5000 piece of software. Hardware requirements are similar to FCP, except you MUST have two monitors (user interface and video preview), and a Radeon 9800 is the minimal graphics card allowed.

You can import the XML file and it drops all your shots, in order from timeline, into Final Touch HD (FTHD henceforth).

FTHD is organized into a series of "rooms" to borrow a term from traditional color correction.

As an aside, this tool was developed by asking a lot of traditional colorists what they wanted, and the tool is mostly organized around that kind of workflow. Now, myself, coming from the complete DIY, Very Digital Boy, Grew Up On Photoshop approach, this room based approach is a little foreign and uncomfortable. After seeing the workflow, at first I felt awkward in it, but it makes more sense as you get used to it.

In each room you do different tasks - basic setup, calibration, primary color correction, secondary color correction, effects, etc.

Once you're done, you render out the final results to new QuickTime files, and have to integrate that back into FCP. How to do that was a bit fuzzy and I want to roll through that with them tomorrow. But it should be able to relink back into FCP with the now corrected shots.

The things I saw them doing on this $5000 piece of software were about 80% of what I saw eFilm showing they were doing on their proprietary DI tools they had shown at NAB last year for the work they did on Van Helsing.

Except for some potent 3D tracking stuff (which you could do in Shake and integrate into this workflow), this solution did ALMOST everything they showed at NAB, and did some things eFilm said they hoped to add by now.

They were defining looks that could be saved and added to groups of shots (for instance, all of the Camera 1 shots in a 2 camera conversation, so all of the "left side" shots could easily get the same treatments but still be individually tweaked).

All of the settings they were creating could be saved, individually or in whole, and added to shots or groups of shots.

Each individual component of a color grade, be it primary or secondary color correction, effects, softening, grain, etc. could be saved to disk, or the whole group saved to disk, and thus reloaded and applied to shots or groups of shots.

If you don't have an X-Serve RAID to work off of, you can import your files and FTHD will generate low res proxies to work with. When playing back footage, the proxies are used, but when you stop on a still, the full res is instantly swapped back in. Very clever, very well scaled solution.

Watching what it is doing, I'm guessing that this is working very similarly to Motion, in that the CPU handles certain tasks and the GPU is doing a lot of the graphics heavy lifting.

I asked Roland about this and his answers were a bit annoyingly cagey...so be it. But he did say that they were using all their resources that were available to them. Um, OK dude. Yeah.

But it works, and it's very impressive how much it can do in real time. Far, FAR beyond what FCP can do on it's own.

Ideally, in a perfect world, I'd love to see these capabilities rolled into an FCP plug-in, but I know that isn't technically possible.

The rumors that I've been hearing about the next version of Shake is that Motion was just a practice run for what they're going to do with the next big upgrade. Talking to Jean-Luc from Apple who works with Shake, I made it clear that Apple should get better Final Cut Pro HD/Shake integration, and he vigorously nodded his head without saying anything. Apple is aware of this desire and is presumably working on it.

Therefore, as cool as Final Touch HD is, I'd be very curious to see what happens with Shake and FCP before I committed to a $5000 software purchase, and perhaps a $3000 and up control surface.

That said, now that I think about it, even if Shake and FCP handshake beautifully, I'd be EXTREMELY surprised if the color correction tools in Shake were NEARLY as sophisticated as what FTHD is offering in terms of ease of use, organization, and especially speed. This is SUCH a focused tool, oriented around clean, organized workflow and a colorists specific needs. I just don't see how Shake, as a general purpose (but high end) compositing tool would ever have tools this focused outside it's core competency. While you can color correct, and well, within Shake (and do log, which FTHD doesn't), it's not organized around that as a driving principle and primary focus. The workflow and organizational tools aren't there.

Final Touch HD is enough of a breakthrough product that you could base a business on it. A very focused business, but a high quality one.

With Apple's G5 Macs, Final Cut Pro HD, BlackMagic or AJA HD-SDI capture products, X-Serve RAIDs, Xsan, and Final Touch HD, you could compete feature for feature, quality for quality with suites and studios costing more than ten times as much. AND be more flexible in your workflow, and still work at high speed.

And that's the kind of thing revolutions are built upon.

-mike

Mandatory - click on "Comments" link immediately below this for more info from the developer explaining some key points I got wrong in the above write-up.