Mostly Coherent

I was the guest host on this week’s Mostly Photo show with Leo Laporte and Lisa Bettany. We talked about shooting stills and video and getting the most out of post-processing, and I showed off some video gear from Redrock Micro and Zacuto. I’ve been a huge fan of Leo’s entrepreneurial empire and Lisa’s photography for years, so it was a blast getting to hang with them.

Click the photos to jump directly to my three tips:

I used this shot to talk about what I call “decoy shooting.” Canon 5D, 50mm F1.4.

I used this shot as an example of achieving apealing (i.e porange) skin tones. Canon 5D Mark II, 50mm F1.2L.

I used this shot as an example of color contrast, and showed how to use the split-tone controls in Adobe Lightroom to achieve this look. This image is available as a free iPad wallpaper here. Canon 5D, 24–105 F4L.

Lisa very kindly mentioned my Fact, Moment, Light post. Please do check it out if you’re a new visitor to Prolost!

Final Cut Pro X

Apple took over the Final Cut Pro User Group Supermeet at NAB in Las Vegas last night to show a preview of the complete reboot of Final Cut Pro that Steve Jobs himself tersely teased a year ago.

Apple hasn’t realeased anything official for those who weren’t there, but these videos are OK. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, FreshDV has excellent condensed coverage. And there are worthwhile write-ups from Larry Jordan (who was one of the few who saw this six weeks ago at Apple), Scott Simmons, and Walter Biscardi. UPDATE: And a first-the-bad-news impression by Mike Jones.

Two Free Color Correction Plug-ins from Red Giant Software

Today Red Giant Software released two new Magic Bullet effects for Final Cut, Premiere, and After Effects, and they are 100% free for any kind of use.

First up is Colorista Free. Part of the goal of the original Colorista was to create a single, easy-to-use 3-way color corrector that would be consistent across multiple platforms. When we updated it to Colorista II, the goal expanded to packing as much color correction power as could possibly fit into one effect. Colorista II has been extremely popular, which warms my heart, because it means filmmakers everywhere are putting real care into their color correction work.

But I never lost sight of that original goal of creating a color corrector that everyone could use. I pointed out to the team that Rebel CC continues to be a popular download from Prolost. We joked internally that Colorista II was so powerful, we should just give the original Colorista away for free.

And then I stopped laughing.

Colorista Free isn’t exactly the original Colorista. It lacks a few features, most notably Power Masks. But by stripping it down to something simple, we enabled a feature that even Colorista II can’t boast: CDL compatibility.

CDL stands for Color Decision List. Like an EDL, but for color corrections, the CDL is a method of sharing simple, primary grades between different systems. It was created by the American Society of Cinematographers and is supported by nearly all high-end color grading systems.

Twirl open the CDL section of Colorista Free and you’ll see nine sliders called Slope, Offset, and Power. These, along with the Saturation control, are the ten values that the CDL uses to communicate a grade. You can edit them directly if you like, but you don’t have to—they are a mirror of the color wheels. If you have CDL values from another system, you can enter them manually, or create a scripted workflow that transfers values to and from these sliders.

The CDL is an emerging standard and the workflows surrounding it are not set in stone, so we’re releasing Colorista Free as “workflow ready,” in part to help encourage people to use the CDL, and maybe even share the scripts and tools they use to build a workflow around Colorista Free and other CDL-compliant tools.

If you want an easy way to ensure that CDL values stay attached to your shots, Colorista Free allows you to burn them in to the image. In this way you could do a rough color pass on an edit and send it along to an online color session. The colorist can use the values burned-in to the image as a starting point for their grading, even if they don’t have an automated CDL pipeline.

Or you can just ignore all that stuff and add a free color corrector to your arsenal, confident that you can share your projects with others without requiring them to buy any plug-ins.

Magic Bullet Colorista Free works with Adobe After Effects CS3, CS4 and CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and Final Cut Pro 6 and 7.

LUT Buddy is also about sharing color corrections, but in a completely different way. Look Up Tables, or LUTs for short, are compact files capable of holding complex color adjustments. People use LUTs to share color grades, simulate display devices and film stocks, and correct gamma and color space issues. The problem is, they’re hard to make. LUT Buddy solves that handily by drawing an unfolded color cube on your image. You can then color correct it however you like. A second application of LUT Buddy reads the corrected colors from the cube and stores the adjustment as a LUT. You can then save that LUT in a variety of formats, or load it back in to LUT Buddy to apply the color correction. With LUT Buddy, a ten-layer-deep color correction can be compacted into one, tiny file that can be loaded into almost any high-end system, and even used for real-time previews on set.

Magic Bullet LUT Buddy works with Adobe After Effects CS3, CS4 and CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, Final Cut Pro 6 and 7, and Motion 3 and 4.

FXPHD April Term, NAB 2011

FXPHD have announced their April term, which includes a course called Epic On Location, where Mike Seymour and I learn you up some Epic. FXPHD courses are always amazing. I have a friend who mastered an entire RED One feature on a single Mac Pro using the guidance of past RED courses. In this case, Mike literally got on a plane from LA, where he had just picked up his Epic, and flew straight back to the other side of the planet to start using the camera to shoot for the class. I landed in New Zealand a few days later and within an hour of stepping off the plane, I was hanging upside-down from cables with a camera. We had a blast shooting some amazing footage, from cars, ziplines, and helicpoters, on rigs designed for much larger cameras and rigs designed for lightweight DSLRs.

I can’t recommend FXPHD enough, but in this case, this course truly is the only game in town when it comes to learning about this revolutionary new camera.

I will be at NAB for one day only (I’m slowly learning how not to go), Tuesday, April 12th, joining Mike on stage at the Post Pit (Booth SL12205) to talk more about the camera. Come by and say hi and then push right past me when you realize that the Epic is also there. I’ll understand.

I will also mention a few cool new things from Red Giant Software. Stuff you’ll like.

HD Magazine has an article about our New Zealand shoot, featuring some photos of and by me. More photos can be found at my Flickr site.