Apple Color or Adobe After Effects for grading

[Kim Frank]

I would love to hear your oppinions about using Color vs. AE for colorgrading. Till now I used AE
(because of my Photoshop backround) but I hate the messy Timeline and several subkomps.
And its missing a vector scope and the ability of re-whitebalancing.
What do you guys work with and why?

[Noah Kadner]

It really depends if you are coming from Premiere or FCP. Color is dedicated to color correction from FCP- literally does nothing else. AFX does color correction as a sidebar to heavy duty compositing from Premiere. So if I had a major effects heavy project edited in Premiere I'd do it in AFX. Otherwise I'd go Color from FCP.

Noah

[Imran Farouk]

Color for me, only because I find AE to be a bit too messy and I like the way Color is structured, its easy enough to do as a newbie to coloring and even more so it goes all the way to Pros being able to use it, so you discover and understand things from beginning till your Pro days.

In an Apple sort of way, it just works! Hardly used AE enough to tell you the difference but when I did try, I found that Color was still pretty much the best between the two. Dunno, some people like AE. I've always viewed it as a plain FX program...

[Lars Steenhoff]

if you work on a laptop AE seems better suited to a smaller screen

[sander kamp]

Some things work better in AE, some better in Color. For general color grading Color is much better since you can play back the footage and see what you are doing right away, rather then adjust something, waiting for it to render, adjust something, waiting for it to render, and so on.

After Effects is better when you need to do some precise masking, change a single color, manage noise, selectively blur something and so on. Things that Color is just too rough and global for.

[Hrvoje Simic]

AE is not designed for fast and efficient colour work.

[Eren Ozkural]

But it is very powerful and precise. Just takes time to get used to and isn't as quick to review footage. That problem should be minimised with CS5 and 64 bit only software.

[Sean Lee]

So if you had the budget for it, would you do some broad brush strokes colour work with Color and then go into After Effects for some fine tuning? Or is that too much?

[Brandon Kraemer]

So if you had the budget for it, would you do some broad brush strokes colour work with Color and then go into After Effects for some fine tuning? Or is that too much?

I send color corrected plates to AE all the time for Compositing, where by it's nature, some additional color correcting takes place, but I wouldn't send it to AE just for additional CC. Short of adding some kind of effects filter, there is nothing you can't do in Color in terms of grading.

I like Synthetic Aperture too, but it's no where near as streamlined as Color since it's a plugin, not an integrated interface.

[Eren Ozkural]

The AE interface comes second nature to me so I just get into the nitty gritty. If time is a factor I use Magic Bullet Colorista which streamlines the whole process.

Colour is fantastic for it's speed and it's compatability with new control interfaces is a real bonus. I'm personally happy with AE though. I don't feel any limitations beyond my own skill which in turn lets me experiment and push my boundaries.

[Joshua Brown]

For quick and efficient Grading and looks, I use color. Like some said, if you need to do some real nitpicky stuff, I'd do it later in AE.

-J.A.Brown

[Jean-Charles Wolfarth]

A small question : if you're grading say, a feature, and you would like to have an overview of all the shots you're grading to preserve homogeneity, is After Effects a good solution, even with color finesse ? The timeline stuff isn't really practical...

I don't know Color, but is there a way to classify shots according to the atmosphere you're trying to show while grading ?

Is it possible to use Color with external 4K 16bit TIFFS and an EDL, without using Final Cut (if the editing was done with Premiere CS4 for instance)

[Kim Frank]

I've seen a comparrison between the on board CC Tools of after Effects and Color finesse. The On board tools did a really bad job. Anyone has experience with the different quality of colour correcting tools In Color an AE?

[Charles Angus]

It really depends if you are coming from Premiere or FCP. Color is dedicated to color correction from FCP- literally does nothing else. AFX does color correction as a sidebar to heavy duty compositing from Premiere. So if I had a major effects heavy project edited in Premiere I'd do it in AFX. Otherwise I'd go Color from FCP.

Noah

I have to disagree with you a little, Noah. Color can work in a tape-to-tape style workflow using an EDL cutlist to notch a Quicktime file, which could come from any source.

My vote is for Color, simply because it has waveform, vectorscope, and a dedicated colour correction interface. It also works with control surfaces, if you can afford to go that route. It can be buggy as hell, sometimes, though, so it's not for the computer illiterate (or impatient).

[Kim Frank]

My vote is for Color, simply because it has waveform, vectorscope, and a dedicated colour correction interface. It also works with control surfaces, if you can afford to go that route. It can be buggy as hell, sometimes, though, so it's not for the computer illiterate (or impatient).

But I just found out about Color Finesse and it does have
Scopes etc. Does anyone know about quality differences of
The CC tools in apple color and color finesse?

[Mark Wilkinson]

They are all 32-bit floating point, but as always, look at the details. Color manages the float color data differently from panel to panel. I'm not sure about Color Finesse. Colorista is great, but a little rudimentary - and you need an external scope solution.

IMO Color is really the best option until you step up to Scratch.

But I'm very curious to know if anyone can explain what data the Red panel in Color is sending to the main panels. If you go to a DaVinci bay and ingest through Clipster, the DaVinci gets whatever data to the Clipster sends - usually 10-bit log. Does this analogy hold for Color?

This is all secondary to workflow most of the time, but I am curious.

[Sean Lee]

I send color corrected plates to AE all the time for Compositing, where by it's nature, some additional color correcting takes place, but I wouldn't send it to AE just for additional CC. Short of adding some kind of effects filter, there is nothing you can't do in Color in terms of grading.

I like Synthetic Aperture too, but it's no where near as streamlined as Color since it's a plugin, not an integrated interface.

Thanks for that. I wasn't sure how others might do it. For me personally, I was planning to buy the complete Premier Pro package with After Effects. It was a choice between that or the complete Apple FCP package so using either programs would not have been an option for me.

[Brandon Kraemer]

Thanks for that. I wasn't sure how others might do it. For me personally, I was planning to buy the complete Premier Pro package with After Effects. It was a choice between that or the complete Apple FCP package so using either programs would not have been an option for me.

I haven't used Premier Pro so I can't speak to that, but I am a heavy AE user. For my typical workflow, Automatic Duck Pro Import AE is a great tool for moving my color corrected conformed timelines to AE.

[JoshBertrand]

Personally I like AE in many ways over Color, but it does depend on the project. I'm fast in AE, but Color can be faster for sure if you don't need to go deep with each shot. I feel like I can do anything to a shot in AE though (which can be too tempting sometimes I'm sure). Also depending on your project needs Color can be much faster to render by setting the debayer to Half-res whereas AE always does a full 4K debayer.

While grading in AE can be done with the included toolset, it becomes much easier with some proper scopes. I use Synthetic Aperature's Test Gear (http://www.synthetic-ap.com/products/tg/index.html).

As for pushing the color around I like a combination of Frishluft Curves (http://frischluft.com/curves/index.php) for some really easy to grab and tweak handles, plus a bit of Magic Bullet Colorista for the handy color wheels. Also, if you are doing anything extreme to the color, make sure you're project settings are set for 32bpc compositing.

Cheers,
Josh.

[Kim Frank]

Josh...
The rendering time AE takes to see some seconds in motion is my biggest cocern.
There has been a post about a secret menu that speeds up the Ram preview.
I'll try to find it.
I will look at the tools you recommended.
But one question: does the 32 bit setting also work for 10 bit material?

[Mark Wilkinson]

Yes, 32-bit will work with 10-bit material.

[JoshBertrand]

Yes, It's true, RAM preview is always painful. I think the button you mention is "Render multiple frames simultaneously" under Memory and Multiprocessing. This can sometimes make AE less stable in my experience, but does really speed things up for the most part. Here's to hoping there will be some sort of awesomeness going on with RedRocket in AE. That would be fantastic. Since most of the render (and RAM preview time) is spent debayering, we could get close to (or at) real time effects. Might not happen til CS5 though.

[Brandon Kraemer]

Yes, It's true, RAM preview is always painful. I think the button you mention is "Render multiple frames simultaneously" under Memory and Multiprocessing. This can sometimes make AE less stable in my experience, but does really speed things up for the most part.

from my experience there is an art to these settings...

if your going to use multiprocessors, you have to turn down the RAM cache in prefs to allow for enough RAM for each processor to work with. I leave multiprocessors off until I render, and only when I have long or render intensive sequences to write to disk. Otherwise I leave the RAM cache at a high volume and RAM preview. It seems most stable this way.