We all know FCPX now has colour wheels and curves, but what about doing more advanced colour corrections? How about a plugin that can track masks, use ACES colour spaces and add film grain? Oliver Peters takes a look a the new Colour Finale 2.
HDR, camera raw, and log profiles are an ever-increasing part of video acquisition, so post-production color correction has become an essential part of every project. Final Cut Pro X initially offered only basic color correction tools, which were quickly augmented by third party developers.
One of the earliest was Color Finale - the brainchild of colorist/trainer Denver Riddle and ex-DI supervisor and color correction software designer Dmitry Lavrov. In the last year Lavrov created both Cinema Grade, now owned and run by Riddle, and Color Finale 2.0, owned and run by Lavrov himself under his own company, Color Trix Ltd.
By focusing exclusively on the development of Color Finale 2.0, Lavrov can bring to market more advanced feature ideas, upgrades, and options with the intent of making Final Cut a professional grading solution.
For many, Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve and Fimlight's Baselight systems set the standard for color correction and grading. So you might ask, why bother? But if you edit with Final Cut Pro X, then this requires a roundtrip between Final Cut and a dedicated grading suite or application.
Roundtrips pose a few issues, including turnaround time, additional media rendering, and frequent translation errors with the edit and effects data between the edit and the grading application. The ideal situation is to never leave the editing application, but that requires more than just a few, simple color correction filters.
Over the course of eight years of Final Cut Pro X's existence, the internal color tools have been improved and even more third-party color correction plug-ins have been developed. However, effective and fast color correction isn't only about looks presets, LUTs, and filters. It's about having a tool that is properly designed for a grading workflow.
If you want to do advanced correction in FCPX with the least amount of clicking back-and-forth, then there are really only two options: Coremelt's Chromatic and Color Finale.
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This brings us to the end of 2019 and the release of Color Finale 2.0, which has been redesigned from the ground up as a new and improved version of the original.
The update has been optimized for Metal and the newest color management, such as ACES. It comes in two versions - standard and Pro. Color Finale 2 Pro supports more features, such as Tangent panel control, ACES color space, group grading, mask tracking, and film grain emulation.
Color Finale has been designed from the beginning as only a Final Cut Pro X plug-in. This focus means better optimization and a better user experience.
Primary color correction
Color Finale 2 is intended to give Final Cut users similar grading control to that of Resolve, Avid Symphony, or Adobe Premiere Pro's Lumetri panel. It packs a lot of punch and honestly, there's a lot more than I can easily cover with any depth here.
The user interface is designed around two components: the FCPX Inspector controls and the floating Layers panel. The Inspector pane is a lot more than simply the place from which to launch the Layers panel. In fact, it's a separate primary grading panel, not unlike the functions of the Basic tab within Adobe's Lumetri panel.
The Inspector pane is where you control color management, along with exposure, contrast, pivot, temperature, tint, saturation, and sharpness.
According to Lavrov, "Our Exposure tool is calibrated to real camera F-stop numbers. We’ve actually taken numerous images with the cameras and test charts shot at the different exposure settings and matched those to our slider control. Basically setting the Exposure slider to 1 means you've increased it by one stop up."
There are also copy and paste buttons to transfer Color Finale settings between clips, false color indicators, and shot-matching based on standard color charts. Finally, there's a Film Emulation tab, which is really a set of film grain controls. At the bottom is a mix slider to control the opacity value of the applied correction.
Layers
The real power of Color Finale 2 happens when you launch the Layers panel. This panel can be resized and positioned anywhere over the FCPX interface. It includes four tools: lift/gamma/gain color wheels/sliders (aka "telecine" controls), luma+RGB curves, six-vector secondary color, and hue/sat curves.
This is rounded out by a looks preset browser. Each of these tools can be masked and the masks can be tracked within the image. Mask tracking is good, though not quite as fast as Resolve's tracker (almost nothing is).
I suspect most users will spend the bulk of their time with color wheels, which can be toggled from wheels to sliders, depending on your preference. Of course, if you invested in a Tangent panel, then the physical trackballs control the color wheels. Another nice aspect of the lift/gamma/gain color tool is saturation management. You can adjust saturation for each of the three ranges.
There is also a master saturation control with separate controls for shadow and highlight range restrictions. This means that you can increase overall saturation, but adjust the shadow or highlights range value so that more or less of the dark or light areas of the image are affected.
As you add tools, each stacks as a new layer within the panel. The resulting color correction is the sum of all of the layers.
You can stack as many layers as you like and the same tool can be used more than once. Layers can be turned on and off to see how that correction affects the image. They can also be reordered and grouped into a folder.
In fact, when you load a preset look, this is actually a group of tools set to generate that look. Finally, each layer has a blend control to set the opacity percentage and alter the blend mode - normal, add, multiply, etc - for different results.
Advanced features
Let me expand on a few of the advanced grading features, such as color management. You have control over four methods: 1) assume video (the default) - intended for regular Rec 709 video or log footage where FCPX has already applied a LUT (ARRI Alexa, for example); 2) assume log - pick this if you don't know the camera type and Color Finale will apply a generic Rec 709 LUT correction; 3) use ACES; and 4) use input LUT - import a technical or custom LUT file that you wish to apply to a clip.
ACES is an advanced color management workflow designed for certain delivery specs, such as for Netflix originals.
The intent of the ACES color space is to be an intermediate color space that can be compatible with different display systems, so that your grade will look the same on any of these displays. Ideally you want to select ACES if you are working within a complete ACES color pipeline; however, you can still apply it to shots for general grading even if you don't have to provide an ACES-compliant master.
To use it, you must select both the input LUT (typically a camera-specific technical LUT) and the target display color space, such as Rec 709 100 nits (for non-HDR TVs and monitors).
In order to facilitate a proper ACES workflow, Color Trix added the ability to import and export CDLs (color decisions lists). Currently this is more for testing purposes and is designed for compatibility between Final Cut and ACES-compliant grading systems, like Baselight. A CDL is essentially like an EDL (edit decision list), but with basic color correction information. This will translate to the lift/gamma/gain/saturation settings in Color Finale 2 Pro, but nothing more complex, such as curves, selective color, or masks.
Performance and workflow
Overall, I really liked how the various tools worked. Response was fast and I was able to get good grading results with a build-up of several layers. In addition, I prefer the ergonomics of a horizontal layout for color wheels versus the cluster of controls used by Apple's built-in tool.
I had tested the betas of both Color Finale 1.0 and now 2.0 and I remember that it originally took a while to dial in the RGB curves for the 1.0 release. In general, curves can be quite destructive, so if you don't get the math right, you'll see banding with very little change of a curve. That was fixed before 1.0 was ever released and the quality in 2.0 looks very good.
Color Finale 2.0 beta had an issue with color wheels. For some users (myself included) the image didn't update in real-time as you moved the color wheel pucks with a mouse. This was fixed right after release with an update. So if you are experiencing that issue, make sure you have re-installed the update.
The difference between grading and simple clip-based color correction is workflow. That's where a good colorist using a dedicated grading application will shine.
Unfortunately the "apply color correction from one (two, three) clip(s) back" command in Final Cut Pro X can only be used with its own built-in correction. So if you intend to use Color Finale 2 for a full timeline of clips, then you have to develop a workflow to quickly apply the Color Finale or Color Finale Pro effect, without constantly dragging it from the effects browser to each individual clip.
One solution is to apply the effect to the first clip, copy that clip, select all the rest, and then apply "paste effects" or "paste attributes" to the rest of the clips in the timeline. As you move from clip to clip, the Color Finale effect is open in the Inspector so you can tweak settings and edit layers as needed. I have found that by using this method the layers panel often doesn't stay open persistently.
The second method is to designate the Color Finale or Pro effect as the default video effect and map "apply default effect" to a key. Using this second method, the panel stayed open in my testing when go through successive clips on the timeline.
Documentation and tutorials are a bit light at the moment, so hopefully Color Trix will begin posting more tips-and-tricks information to their support page or YouTube channel.
One can only run a valid test of any plug-in by using it on a real project. As an example of what you can do with Color Finale 2, I've graded Philip Bloom's 2013 "Hiding Place" short featuring actress Kate Loustau. This was shot on the London Eye in "stealth" mode using the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. Bloom made the ungraded cut available for non-commercial use. I've used it a number of times to test color correction applications. Click the link to see the video, which includes two different grading looks, achieved through Color Final 2 Pro.
Color Finale 2.0 is a huge improvement over the original, but it's not a one-click solution. It's designed as an advanced, yet easy to use color correction tool. I find the toolset and visual results similar to the old Apple Color. The graded images appear very natural, which is a good fit for my aesthetic. DaVinci Resolve is better for extreme "surgical" grading, but Color Finale 2.0 certainly covers at least 90% of most color correction needs and styles.
If you want to stay entirely within the Final Cut Pro X environment and skip the roundtrips, then Color Finale 2 Pro should be part of your arsenal.
It's this sort of extensibility that FCPX users like about the approach Apple has taken. Having powerful tools, like Color Finale 2.0, from independent developers, like Color Trix, definitely validates the concept.
Check out the Color Finale website for the various purchase and upgrade plans, including add-ons, like the Ascend presets packages.
