HD For Indies

Colorista is a new color correction tool that works in Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and Motion on Intel Macs (and G5s, of course, adding Avid Xpress Pro), and After Effects, Premiere Pro, press DV, Xpress Pro, Media Composer, and Avid Symphony on Windows based systems.

It works the same way in all programs.

It works like the high end tools do - lift/gamma/gain rings, and shadow/midtone/highlight color wheels - just like Final Touch, Lustre, discreet, daVinci, etc. high end color correction & grading systems.

You can do power windows - soft feathered resizable/rotatable square/oval vignettes.

You can stack multiple instances safely without tearing up your image.

Your 10 bit projects STAY 10 bit when using this in FCP...unlike Color Finesse and some other options.

It uses the GPU and can be realtime in up to 720p projects.

And it is only $200.

Insert Keanu "Woah." Merry Christmas to us indies indeed!

I'd been holding off waiting to do a big long write up on why this is a big deal, but Stu, the creator of it, beat me to it, and probably puts it better, too. I'm wholeheartedly (with permission) ripping off his blog entry on it, since he puts it well. I try to avoid press release regurgitation, but I know, like, respect, and trust Stu, so I'll let him speak for himself (plus I'm short on time):

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Why did we make a 3-way color corrector to sell to people who, with the exception of After Effects users, already have a built-in 3-way CC tool? Six reasons:

Correct Like The Pros
Colorista works like Final Touch, Da Vinci, Discrete Lustre, iQ, and other professional grading systems that use the industry standard color model of Lift, Gamma and Gain. The ASC is even working towards codifying this into a system that can be communicated as universally as an EDL. Lift/Gamma/Gain allows you to correct highlights, midtones and shadows, respectively, but without the need to define the value ranges, which means you spend more time color correcting and less time fiddling with controls. In other words...

Fewer Controls, More Power
Colorists need to work fast and efficiently, so having fewer knobs is a good thing. We took the most-used aspects of professional grading systems and packed them into an efficient, easy to use package. Colorista does more than most built-in 3-ways, and with fewer controls.

Power Masks
Isolating areas of the frame to correct is one of the power tools in the colorist's kit. What can you do with piddly little circles and squares? Ask a Da Vinci operator. Sure, sometimes you need deeper masking, but for that you can jump into After Effects. Face lights, vignettes, and spot corrections should be fast, easy, and render in realtime.

Realtime?
Depending on your hardware and video resolution, yes! Works especially well in host applications that lead the market in realtime operation, such as Apple Motion and Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0.

Grade, Don't Degrade
In After Effects 7, Colorista is a 32-bit floating-point plug-in. Stack as many of them on top of each other as you want, you cannot hurt your image. Finally, a tool you can use to effortlessly color correct HDR images.

Three Rings to Rule Them All
Just when you started to master Levels, you need to do some color work in Final Cut Pro. Just when you learn to produce decent results with FCP's 3-way, you take a freelance gig using Avid. Colorista works the same in every host application, meaning that you can learn it once and use it everywhere. And one seat of Colorista licenses you to use the plug-in in every one of the host applications, on Mac or Windows.

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Click here to go to Stu's blog entry that has a nice little demo of how this rocks.

Stu and I have swapped a couple of emails on this, and I'd asked, in light of his upcoming book (review/interview forthcoming), whether this changed the picture on using FCP for finishing, or whether to stick to using After Effects as a render pipeline like the DV Rebel's Guide suggests. He said that since you can use this plugin in both, do your temp/pretty damn good work in FCP, and finish with a better/best render in AE (I'm paraphrasing, pardon Stu). OooooOOOOOOOOooooohhhh....good indeed! Scaleable options are always BEST!

The only omission that makes me sigh is the lack of secondary color correction tools - but this is a version one product, and the developers are keenly aware of the user base's demand for this feature. Besides speed, that is one of the key features that truly separates the professional tools from the rest.

Other coverage on Colorista:

ProLost: Colorista!

Magic Bullet Colorista v1.0 - overview page from Red Giant

Magic Bullet Colorista - features page from Red Giant

Studio Daily | Red Giant Offers New Color Correction Tool: Magic Bullet Colorista

Red Giant presents Magic Bullet Colorista v1.0 - DV Guru

MacNN | Red Giant ships Magic Bullet Colorista

So I'll have more to say after talking to Stu as soon as I can arrange it. I need to spend some more time with it myself - it looks incredibly promising, offering the kind of power & control that Final Touch did that I worked and sweated over for months. It won't be as fast, but at a tiny fraction of the cost, without the pain of leaving the FCP environment, this is a big big deal.

-mike

PS - It has been possible to use Color Finesse for a similar workflow - do CC in FCP, then Duck it into AE for rendering, but in FCP, Color Finesse was limited to 8 bits (like Magic Bullet was), and was non GPU accelerated, and cost more, and wasn't Universal Binary until quite recently (just noticed something on it a few minutes ago). This just seems Mo Bettah at the moment.