Now featuring: Lightroom 1.0.
I mean c'mon, at least name the Recovery and Vibrancy sliders something slightly different.
Competition between Aperture and Lightroom should be good for photographers, but that only works if each stakes out unique territory in which to innovate.
More w00ting later, but for now just a quick note that the Conduit Suite was released today. Like Magic Bullet Looks, you get a standalone app and plug-ins for all your favorite hosts together in one package.
Speaking of Magic Bullet and me being behind on things, Magic Bullet Frames was released recently as well, providing wicked fast and smooth deinterlacing and 24p conversion right in your NLE.
Conduit has always allowed you to do nodal compositing in Final Cut and Motion, which to me was like allowing you to do brain surgery in a bumper car. But now it works in Photoshop and After Effects as well, which makes a ton more sense. I've been waiting for years on After Effects's front lawn holding a nodal boom box over my head, and while this doesn't quite answer all my hopes and dreams, it's a damn fine start.
By the way, Conduit is not just a complete GPU-accelerated real-time compositing system that now runs inside all your favorite apps. It's also the most innovative visualization of the venerable nodal compositing model ever implemented. In other words, these aren't just nodes, these are phat nodez with very clever ways of showing you what's going where. Nice job DV Garage.
EDIT: To help cut through the confusion about what platforms Conduit runs on, here's a critical bit from the DV Garage site:
What do you get?Conduit Live - A GPU-powered, stand-alone nodal capture tool designed for live, real-time video compositing (Mac only).
Conduit fxPlug - GPU-powered nodal ccompositing for Final Cut Pro and Motion (Mac only).
Conduit After Effects - Nodal compositing for After Effects. (Mac and Windows).
Conduit Photoshop - Nodal compositing for Photoshop (Mac and Windows)
You may now return to your usual degree of dissatisfaction with Quicktime "Pro."
More like this please!
A while back I posted a workaround for maintaining all the IRE values, even those above 100%, when using Colorista in Final Cut Pro. With Final Cut 6.0.2, this workaround is no longer needed (yay!), but you'd never know until someone told you. Allow me to explain.
Here's a shot in Final Cut 6.0.2. Note that the windows are above 100 IRE (click to enlarge).
If you apply Colorista, you'll see the values get clipped to 100%. This is not cool.
To fix this, you first need to select Sequence → Settings and set the sequence to always render in high-precision YUV:
When you go back to the timeline you'll see that the highlights are still clipped. But the key is in the wording—always render in high-precision YUV. So go ahead and hit Cmd + R to render the shot:
Your highlights are back! Final Cut is always using a lower-quality render setting as a placeholder until you actually render the shot. When you do, both Final Cut and Colorista do their thing in full floating-point color.
If you make a change to Colorista's settings, you'll get your red line back and your apparent clipping:
...but as soon as you render you'll get all your highlights back:
Enjoy!
