The Tao Colorist

Who Slipped Me a Mickey?

Here at Tao HQ, the Hurricane-Formerly-Known-As-Sandy keeps on giving... in the form of a team of roofers walking on top of my head and making it nearly impossible to get any work done. They're repairing the work done by a tree going through our roof.

Unfortunately, with one of the wettest Junes on record here in the New York / New Jersey area... these roofers can't seem to get their job done. And so Team Tao gets to live under 3,000 quadrillion square feet of mismatched blue and brown tarps . . . giving us an understanding of both the effectiveness of tarp roofing and the constant fear of wind + water shredding that effectiveness.

Did I mention its been one of the wettest Junes on record?

And that my grading suite is directly below that section of the roof?

Yeah. My head hurts. And it wasn't that 12-Year Tawny Port from last night.

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What else has been soooo occupying me that I didn't have time for a regular newsletter this week?

 

 

I've been fortunate to beta test SpeedGrade CC for the past few months. And, with the help of Robbie Carman and Dan Moran, I've been working on a 3+ hour video training title to be released at the end of June on MixingLight.com. This means I've been digging pretty deeply into this app (doing marathon-length recording sessions all week) and I thought I'd share some thoughts about this new version.

 

Does SpeedGrade CC have potential?
Since the start of 2013, the Mixing Light Team spent several hours discussing what our first self-contained training title might be. And several more hours discussing if SpeedGrade 'Next' was useful enough to a broad enough audience that we should spend a few weeks development time on this title?

 

The answer we came up with: Yes. 

 

But . . .

In many ways SpeedGrade CC (SGCC) didn't remove any of the barriers that kept us from adopting SpeedGrade 6. It still had: Single track of video, no XML import, codec support not on par with Premiere Pro, its tuned to a very niche DPX workflow, multiple frame rates not supported, tracking that's very accurate but dog-slow.

 

Two things DID grab our attention: Matrox & AJA support for external monitoring on reference monitors (BlackMagic support is supposedly on the way). And The Lumetri Effect 

 

Lumetri = SpeedGrade Inside Premiere Pro CC

The Lumetri Effect is a filter in Premiere Pro CC that does one thing only: It opens SGCC's native .look files (essentially, saving off all the parameters of the full color correct of a shot... all its layers, masks, LUTs, motion tracks, everything), applies them to a shot in Premiere and renders that shot using SGCC's high-quality render engine inside Premiere Pro CC.

 

In other words, SpeedGrade is now inside Premiere.

 

Now, this isn't live dynamic linking. Not by a long shot. And there are no controls inside Premiere to modify the .look file (you'll need to jump into SpeedGrade, make the change, re-export the .look file and reimport into Premiere). But given that so many other feature requests on our Wish List for SGCC didn't get executed, and since it must have taken A TON of development time to get this simple little integration to work as it does, Team Mixing Light decided this is a harbinger of much closer integration between SpeedGrade CC and Premiere Pro CC.

 

And once we decided this seems to be the direction Adobe is going with SpeedGrade, we decided we wanted to be on the front edge of the coming SGCC wave. And so a month ago we started development of our training title.

 

SpeedGrade CC: A Capable, Fast Grading App

After working with it rather extensively, I've finally come to the conclusion that anyone trying SpeedGrade for the first time must take its name at face value. 

 

SpeedGrade is about SPEED. It's 12-way color corrector allows for very targeted corrections - the sort that most colorists would either use Curves or try to pull a narrow luma key.

 

In fact, I'm now finding myself sitting in Resolve and reaching for the Midtone Gamma or the Shadow Gain contrast wheels only to realize . . . damn, wrong app! And I do that at least twice every session. Standard 3-Way color wheels suddenly seem very limiting. The first time that happened to me I KNEW SGCC is on to something and our decision to do training for this app on MixingLight was the correct one.

 

And for mouse-based colorists, the gimmick'y looking Warm / Cool and Green / Magenta tinting sliders are a great solution for fixing color casts in one mouse movement that control surface colorists would do with a simultaneous move on both the Gamma and Gain trackballs using two hands. They're nifty, quick tools.

 

As DaVinci Resolve roadmaps itself into a full-blown finishing app (which I applaud), SpeedGrade CC clearly enjoys being a very fast grading app that doesn't overwhelm the interface but still has a ton of deep complexity if you decide to go looking for it.

 

SpeedGrade Training: Coming to MixingLight.com!
Team MixingLight still hasn't decided what we're going to call our series of self-contained training titles. But the SGCC title is a good example of what we're shooting for:

• 3-4 hour length (think: Deep QuickStarts)
• Be relatively inexpensive (no more than $70 for non-members, less expensive for monthly members)
• 90% of the 45-55 videos in the SGCC training title will be under 8 minutes... just like the Insights Library.

I'm looking forward to wrapping up all my recordings this week. And Team MixingLight is working on getting the title in all your hands ASAP.

 One More Thing...