Color Finale for FCP X

[Axel]

 

The guys from ColorGradingCentral have a very good reputation among FCP X users. Let's hope this isn't just hot air ...

PS: Wrong forum.

[utsira]

I'm having a quick play with the 7-day trial just now. First impressions are very good. First of all the interface is very nice. Putting all the colour controls in their own floating window works well. If you have the window open for one shot but shut for another, it will disappear and reappear depending on whether you have selected a clip that you have color finale open for (does that make sense?). If you have color finale open for a bunch of different clips it will switch to represent the settings of whichever clip is currently selected (ie it behaves as you'd expect it would). It plays nice with fullscreen mode too. The only slight disappointment with the windowing is that although you can drag the window to a secondary display, if you start selecting different clips the window snaps back to your primary display. I don't think this is a huge issue, as most of us have large primary displays, and probably want to colour correct on the primary display anyway. (I don't have any 4K/ retina displays, so can't comment on how well it scales)

The best thing about it though is that it gathers all your most commonly used colour tools in a single window, and lets you add multiple instances of a given tool, change the order they are all applied in, adjust the opacity for each one, flick them on and off, rename them etc. For instance, I've got a primary curves correction, then a LUT, then a secondary curves correction on top of that. This is a big improvement on my FCPX LUT workflow up til now, because by default FCPX only gives you very limited control over what order effects are applied in: it only lets you change the order of effects within the "effects" section of the inspector pane (ie it doesn't let you sandwich, say, a color-board correction between two effects slots, if you wanted to do something like that you'd need to use an RT adjustment layer, or nest a clip inside a compound clip). Color FInale is not as powerful as a full-blown nodes system like Resolve of course, but I could see it becoming my one and only colour tool within FCPX. It's nice to have traditional colour wheels back too. What else is good... the new LUT manager lets you put LUTs in custom folders (so no more scrolling through endless lists of LUTs).

[utsira]

Oh, and NoFilmSchool has a coupon for it, lasts for the duration of NAB. I have no connection with Color Grading Central btw, just in case my post above came across as a bit of a rave. 

(is it possible to move this thread to the main forum?)