FCPX 10.4 with better color correction tools!

[Don Kotlos]

Finally some proper color correction tools! It comes with LUT support as well. 

https://www.macprovideo.com/hub/news/apple-announces-final-cut-pro-x-104-heres-whats-new

https://www.provideocoalition.com/final-cut-pro-10-4-announced-demoed-fcpx-creative-summit/

[mercer]

This is great news. I love FCPX... now if only I could import and edit CDNGs.

[Antonis]

[Mattias Burling]

But... just going by the pictures... some of it is already in there and the rest can be had with finale

But I'm also excited. Love FCPX, never looked back from ditching Premiere.

[Axel]

Nevertheless, we hardcore FCP X fanboys have been told that the little colorboard was enough for six years !!!

We finally believed it ourselves, Stockholm syndrome. 

If color swatches and HSL qualifiers/curves were all (besides the rather exotic VR-stuff), it'd be a lame upgrade this year. The majority had these things with CFP or Chromatic already.

This really is pure speculation, but another feature was parenthetically mentioned, which was "HDR". There is no question that Apple is interested in pushing this technology and making it easier to produce. My guess is that the crude colorboard indeed isn't enough for HDR anymore. 8k RAW would then be the buzzwords to impress audiences at the show, but HDR - much more about quality than pixel amounts - was the actual news.

[jonpais]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but while it would appear that HDR has the pope’s, as well as Google’s and NASA’s blessings; and Sony, Panasonic and other manufacturers are adding HLG to their cameras; and even as Blackmagic Design, Apple and other companies have already or are in the process of updating their NLEs; HLG was developed primarily as a distribution format, not an editing one: so that anyone intending to do a even a moderate amount of color correction would be better off avoiding HLG altogether and shooting in LOG instead. I don’t know of any consumer cameras that shoot Dolby Vision or HDR10 as of yet, maybe next year...

[Axel]

Yes, jonpais. I really don't know how yet, but processing for and delivering as a widely accepted HDR (i.e. for Youtube uploads), whatever that takes, would change a lot. And the change is in the air, like Galadriel said. Surely I would buy any book or online training that can help me understand.

[Don Kotlos]

I also would like to see better integration with Logic Pro as Premiere has with Audition. 

I expect better eGPU support as well. 

For heavy grading HDR, shooting in log should still be preferable, but for mild corrections and edits shooting in HLG might be a more efficient workflow. 

Lets not forget that along with camera & NLE HDR support a proper monitor is also necessary  . Therefore for the time being it is of limited use. 

[Asmundma]

We need a simple bus system for roles, and the ability to put a limiter on the main output, without creating a compound clip.

[jonpais]

@Don Kotlos Which is why I think it'll be a long time before we see HDR really take off - the small number of consumer cameras expected to sport HDR in the coming year, the lack of affordable external monitors that support HDR (most people, myself included, already consider $500 a lot for a monitor/recorder), home computer monitors aren't HDR ready and not all televisions are wifi ready or have an encoder to read YT HDR content (though I guess you can purchase a player?). Not all television sets support all available flavors of HDR. For example, a TV set might have Dolby Vision, but not HLG. And apparently, we've got televisions that were rushed to market without certification. And even Sony's a7R III, marketed as HDR ready, is in fact 8 bit. 

[Don Kotlos]

I find the 8bit Log more limiting than the 8bit HLG.  For a delivery medium such as the HDRs supported in A7rIII, you can get away with 8bits without sacrificing much of the quality (like no banding). Sony is trying to sell TVs along with these cameras so I am pretty confident that they didn't just add it to match a spec sheet.  

[Axel]

Slowly but surely HDR is noticed by the content consumers. I was in a shopping mall two weeks ago and they had a gigantic HDR-TV, surrounded by SDR-sets with the same video playing: partly nightsky timelapses (the skies on the other screens appeared grey, the stars faded), partly landscapes with sun (looking like flat LOG clips on the SDR-TVs). The audience very clearly saw the difference. As Yedlin had *proven* in his resolution-myths-debunked video, they couldn't have told the difference between HD and UHD.

But there is no standard agreed upon, as I understood.

How will an 8-bit rec_709 video, no matter the resolution, look on a 3000 nits screen? 

Will today's solutions ("HDR ready") be considered foul compromises very soon (like the early HDV cameras that were little else than "SD plus" if you see the images with today's eyes)?

Or will the said foul compromises be accepted as just enough to make a visible difference, become standard for a long time and allow - for instance - 8-bit 420 to survive another decade?

I'd really like to know.