New Micro Color Panel

[Emanuel]

Recently shown at NAB... What about to show a little bit of love for the most interesting brand for indies maybe ever? ; )

 

[PannySVHS]

5 hours ago, Emanuel said:

What about to show a little bit of love for the most interesting brand for indies maybe ever? ; )

I got two Micro Cine Cameras and one Pocket OG. And the best thing is, I have hardly shot with them. So I feel every day like a kid in the toy store! The panel looks super exiting. How about a whole lotta love for it! 🙂 

 

 

[Emanuel]

@PannySVHS A kid in the toy store! haha Loved the (whole ; ) analogy, Marty! LOL

And I will add now something very straightforward to it... People here, there and everywhere tend to love the wrong ones... Feeling ourselves strictly excited for corporations sound to me like a man to have fantasies with the neighbour's wife rather than praising and paying attention to the wife who is the housekeeper and takes care of the children at home... ; ) The example of the recent purchase of RED by Nikon is the fine example of it, like to see some family business, after all, to be gone, this may occur in something good for the whole indie world... * Sigh * : X 

I believe " a bit " : D of education about what filmmaking actually is, I guess, it wouldn't hurt at all...

It is what it is! :- )

[kye]

I've got mixed feeling for the new panel.

On the plus side, it's got more controls and buttons than the previous one, and includes functions like adding new nodes etc, which you couldn't do with the previous one.

On the negative side, it's still going to be a very limited product, the way that all BM hardware tools seem to be.  If you look at the forums there are simple requests with hundreds of people showing support for them that BM has been ignoring for version-after-version of Resolve and based on their track record just won't ever implement.  No one knows how they choose what to implement and what they don't, but it sure isn't from the forums.

I bought a panel and taught myself to grade using it, and it is very intuitive, but it's very very limited in terms of what you can actually do with it - it's a tool really for people who have to do very basic grading on thousands of shots, week-after-week.  If you want to do anything other than the controls on the panel then it's no good.  Lots of colourists have a tablet or KB/mouse as the first things on the desk.

 

The fact that the panel is small is a great feature, but in terms of it being a step towards what I'd want as a small control surface for mobile grading, it's a small step towards a far-off destination.

[Al Dolega]

I got a Tangent Ripple on eBay a few months ago and found it pretty limited in stock form, at least for my very limited coloring chops.

Shortly afterwards they came out with their custom re-mapping software and I've been meaning to sit down and set it all up, but the new Micro panel seems like it would still be a better tool anyways, and with no fiddling with scripts and such.

It would be cool to see someone hack the color panels and the Speed Editor, which I also have sitting around gathering dust due to limited functionality.

[kye]

1 hour ago, Al Dolega said:

I got a Tangent Ripple on eBay a few months ago and found it pretty limited in stock form, at least for my very limited coloring chops.

Shortly afterwards they came out with their custom re-mapping software and I've been meaning to sit down and set it all up, but the new Micro panel seems like it would still be a better tool anyways, and with no fiddling with scripts and such.

It would be cool to see someone hack the color panels and the Speed Editor, which I also have sitting around gathering dust due to limited functionality.

No-one is going to hack the BM hardware, they will have put a huge amount of effort into the security because they essentially use Resolve to drive hardware sales, so it's critical to their business model.

In terms of buying a panel, here's my advice.

There are two benefits you would get from buying a panel..

The first is speed.  
If you have to grade a 90 minute feature film in 5 days, you will have over 2000 shots to grade and be approaching needing to grade 1 shot or more per minute.  If grading a shot involves doing 6 things, then that's 12000+ actions - PER WEEK!  With these kinds of numbers, if you can save 1s per action, that's 3.3 hours per week saved.  A panel pays for itself in this type of scenario.

The second reason is pushing things against each other.
For example, if you want a bit of teal/orange with the LGG wheels, you will push the Lift wheel towards blue and at the same time you push the Gamma wheel towards orange.  You will be balancing one against the other, and you are adjusting how much of each you push.  This is almost impossible to do if you can't adjust both wheels at the same time, so it's extremely tedious with a mouse for example.  
You might also push Gamma against Gain for a highlight rolloff.  Saturation against Colour Boost for saturation compression, or skintones, etc.  Lots of things where you push one thing against another.  
Only controllers that are official to BM can do this type of simultaneous actions. 

I suggest you take a careful look at what you're doing when you grade a project and look to see if the panel will actually help you do it.  I mean look in detail, confirming which controls in Resolve you use and confirming they're on the panel.  Resolve has 1000 controls and only a very few are on the cheaper panels.

It's also worth checking on things like the HDR Palette how the panel will work.  The HDR Palette has a bunch of wheels but the controller does not.  IIRC the controller moves the three wheels that are visible on the UI, but if you want to adjust three that aren't next to each other then I think you have to use the UI to navigate back and forth, which isn't that smooth a workflow, and you can't push two against each other unless you can control them at the same time, etc.

For example, if you are going to use the Film Look plugin, which has exposure and WB etc, to grade each shot, then you will need a panel that allows control of OFX plugins, which I think is the Mini or Advanced panels, but they're NOT cheap!

The other reason why you might want a panel is to teach yourself the old ways of grading, like LGG or Offset/Contrast/Pivot, and so in this sense the limitation makes sense.  This is why I bought mine, but I now find those controls to be too limiting and to a certain extent, they're kind of a legacy now, although still popular because lots of colourists are old school and learned on those tools.

Anyway, the panels are very good for what they do, but they don't do that much.  In todays world where software is super flexible and UIs are great, when using a panel you will be quickly reminded that BM is a hardware company lol.

[bjohn]

About five years ago I got the ingenious little Beatstep controller system (https://posttools.tachyon-consulting.com/davinci-resolve-controllers/beatstep-resolve-edition/) which seemed promising (and could be used for editing, colour, and  Fairlight) but it was complex to set up and new versions of Resolve started to break things, and then I upgraded to an Apple Silicon Mac so I stopped using it. This is the issue with third-party products in general...the developer has to put in a lot of work to ensure compatibility with new releases of Resolve and if there's not enough demand for the product it eventually isn't worth the effort.

[BTM_Pix]

13 hours ago, kye said:

No-one is going to hack the BM hardware, they will have put a huge amount of effort into the security because they essentially use Resolve to drive hardware sales, so it's critical to their business model.

I did a little man in the middle interface for the SpeedEditor a while back so I could remap it to use with other products like FCPX and LumaFusion.

If the will was there then I'm sure the other surfaces would follow a similar investigative pattern to evaluate and emulate their protocol.

Not to use the surfaces on other software of course but to provide a way for other devices to mimic them.

[kye]

10 hours ago, bjohn said:

About five years ago I got the ingenious little Beatstep controller system (https://posttools.tachyon-consulting.com/davinci-resolve-controllers/beatstep-resolve-edition/) which seemed promising (and could be used for editing, colour, and  Fairlight) but it was complex to set up and new versions of Resolve started to break things, and then I upgraded to an Apple Silicon Mac so I stopped using it. This is the issue with third-party products in general...the developer has to put in a lot of work to ensure compatibility with new releases of Resolve and if there's not enough demand for the product it eventually isn't worth the effort.

I also have that.  It was great and really well designed in terms of how the controller mapped to the functions and the workflow etc.  It was fiddly though, that's for sure.

The only limitation I found with it was that it couldn't do what I described above with pushing two adjustments against each other.  Of course if you don't work that way, then it wouldn't matter.

Comparing the number of controls it offered vs the dedicated BM panels was just insane - I really think that BM could make a killing changing their whole approach to the panels.

Imagine if they made a more generic panel that had "pages" and could be switched between them.  Let's imagine the entry-level one costs $1000 and can get to half-a-dozen pages.  The amateur buys one panel, and switches between the pages, and life is good.  The pro wants dedicated controls for everything without switching, so buys multiple panels and sets each one to a different page.  The pro also buys the "pro" panel that costs $2000 and can access the other restricted panels.  Later on the pro buys more pro panels.  In the end the pro has spent as much as they would have buying the Advanced panel, so there's no loss of income for BM, and the pro gets a customisable surface where the controls go where they want.  This can be configured in 2 minutes in shared spaces like colouring rooms.

10 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

I did a little man in the middle interface for the SpeedEditor a while back so I could remap it to use with other products like FCPX and LumaFusion.

If the will was there then I'm sure the other surfaces would follow a similar investigative pattern to evaluate and emulate their protocol.

Not to use the surfaces on other software of course but to provide a way for other devices to mimic them.

Of course.  Interesting to learn you figured it out though.  The only place online I could find anything on it their attempt failed.  Maybe it failed due to fear of legal action rather than technical impenetrability, but interesting nonetheless.