DaVinci Resolve control surface
No doubt, there are tons of other post-NAB bloggers and magazines covering everything cool and complaining about what wasn’t so cool (kind of like me). I didn’t get a chance to really spend much time at the
Blackmagic Design booth, but I was excited to see
DaVinci Resolve with a starting price of $995 (software only).
Now, it’s unlikely that I’ll be buying it anytime soon. First, I don’t have a Mac, and I’m sure you need a MacPro with a nVidia card that supports CUDA. I believe you also need a control surface. There $30,000 control surface is beautiful, but thankfully, they support third-party controllers that are much cheaper. For someone like me, cost of entry would still be well over $5,000. Not gonna happen. But it’s nice to see DaVinci come down in price under new ownership of Blackmagic Design. Rather than a $800,000 high end-solution, DaVinci could become a mass-market product for video pros.
Of course, Apple has already done similar with Color, and there’s Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse. Color requires a beefy Mac. Again, out of my price ranger for now. Somehow, I never got into Color Finesse. When I used it, it was slow and crashed After Effects a lot. That was years ago. It’s worth a look again as it is a powerful color corrector with built-in scopes. On the higher end, there’s Assimilate’s Scratch, which is still out of range for me. It’s a similar principle to Blackmagic’s plan. Software-based color correction on a beast of a workstation just fast enough for realtime or near-realtime color correction. I believe the absolute cheapest Scratch setup is $11K, workstation computer included. Getting better.
But for now, my color corrector of choice is still Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Suite. Whether I’m using Colorista, Looks, or Mojo, MBS is fast, easy to use, and really offers superior quality to lower-end color correctors. It uses high-end color correction standards like lift-gamma-gain as well as floating point color to help avoid clipping of bright values or color banding. Before Magic Bullet, Avid’s Liquid was the secret weapon of inexpensive color correctors. But banding was still a problem in Liquid. Looks offers the greatest control, allowing power windows, gradients, grain, and a bunch of other tools all in one interface, applied as a single effect. It’s really the best method. If it were applied as a series of effects, each instance returned to the host program would degrade the image. By keeping all the tools for color design within one tool, the effect is only applied once, no matter how much pushing and pulling one does to the image.
That said, I’m waiting for Red Giant to update Looks. It’s missing some significant tools of color correction. At its super-low price, I’m not complaining. But I would pay to get more features built into Looks. Top of the list? Secondary Color Correction. This was the magic of Liquid’s color corrector. In Liquid, you could locally isolate up to 15 regions of color within an image and treat each of them separately. Wait, did you miss that? Imagine someone wearing a green tie that you want to color red. Now, imagine that person standing in front of a grass field. What happens when you isolate the tie and turn it red? The whole field goes red. Using Liquid’s corrector, you could isolate, tweak, and squeeze based on color, but also by continuous area or across the image. I’m not even sure a DaVinci could do that. It was brilliant. Did it have a tracker? No. It’s was a more-or-less hidden feature that just worked (within limits). Now, imagine 15 separate values that could be isolated. For those unfamiliar with color grading, I’m sure this paragraph is very confusing. I’m not the most skilled technical write either. Sorry.
So what would I love to see in Magic Bullet? Secondary color correction with at least 4 color regions, more is always better. Power windows that can be animated with control over the mask edges. Ability to “Grade” within the interface. Currently, within Looks, you work on one shot at a time. In reality, a color grader should grade a shot to their liking, then use it as a reference by which all other shots are “graded.” That means you need to be able to pull up a properly graded shot when working on a second, third or fourth shot. This can mean 2 windows next to each other. It can also mean a split screen. Again, in this case, Liquid was amazing. You could pull the edges of the split screen in any direction. I would propose the option to flip between 2 windows and single split-screen. It would be nice to lock hue angles on the color wheel, then slide value up and down. It would also be cool to be able to import Kuler swatches or import reference images or palettes.
I know Magic Bullet isn’t a top-end color corrector, but it’s used by so many top-end talents because it’s world-class in just the right places. It’s fast, and remarkably easy to learn. Of course, learning practical color theory takes time. It’s something I struggle with. But the software doesn’t get in the way.
Magic Bullet Suite wasn’t updated for NAB. I didn’t even look for the Red Giant Booth. And while the top-end tool, Davinci Resolve is now reaching more hands at a lower price point, it’s still not for me. But even if I can’t afford it, I’m sure glad to see it get cheaper.
informs us that there were as many a 4500 breweries in the US in the late 1800′s. By the 1970′s we were down to about 50 brewing companies. Today, at somewhere between 1400-1800, the number is growing every day. I can’t help but wonder about all of those distinctly American styles of beer that came and went between the 1920′s and the 1970′s. What else might have disappeared? Are recipes floating in people’s attics or buried in family basements?
