Color Finale has to be the most popular third party colour grading plugin for Final Cut Pro X. Today, Color Trix has announced that a new workflow extension beta will become available that will allow FCPX editors to grade remotely.
With Covid restrictions staying with us to possibly the end of the year, we are all looking at working remotely to avoid the commute to work and the risk that goes with it.
Yes, we can swap Libraries and XMLs, but what about remote colour grading?
Today, Dmitry from Color Trix has announced an upcoming beta of Color Finale Connect, a workflow extension for Final Cut Pro that allows remote collaborative grading.
It is not available yet, but you can register on the site to be ready when it is made available.
If you haven't seen or used Color Finale before, make sure you check out Oliver Peter's excellent review on this grading plugin for FCPX.
There is a promo video, but at 12 seconds, there's not a huge amount of info in there! We will have to resort to the press release.
The Color Finale Connect workflow extension adds the ability to collaborate over the internet with a Director, a DoP, editors and clients, and also to teach color grading by example to color grading students, editors and anyone else who is interested in learning from professionals in real-time.
“Color Finale Connect lets editors and directors discuss color grading decisions with a colorist but it also enables business opportunities like, for example, inviting color grading talent to work remotely on editing projects created with Final Cut Pro X or guiding color grading amateurs through the finesses of color correction in one-on-one remote sessions. It’s the only solution available today that allows you to do that from within Final Cut Pro X and at this price point,” Dmitry Lavrov, Managing Director at Color Trix, says.
Color Finale Connect allows users to either join a remote color grading session or to broadcast a session. Users who join a session are able to see and comment upon what a colorist is doing.
When broadcasting a session, a user can either be a colorist who takes the lead or an editor or client who wants to be talked through or comment on color grading decisions taken by a colorist.
To keep Color Finale Connect streamlined and its network requirements as low as possible, attendees communicate with each other using Apple’s built-in Messages, Skype or other chat or VoIP apps.
A single session runs over a pass-word-protected bidirectional channel that uses Color Trix’s server for peer-to-peer communication between the Color Finale workstations logged in to the session.
Color Finale sends full-resolution single frames needed to display the grading changes once, then followed by adjustment metadata only. If the session partici-pants have the original, mirrored footage on their local workstations, only the ad-justment metadata is sent.
“Color Finale Connect is very efficient,” Lavrov says. “As soon as you start changing things, the clip in the Timeline will reflect those changes in near-real-time and settings sliders move accordingly. The color wheel and other UI ele-ments are updated as soon as you let go of the control to finish the action.”
All very interesting, but a bit of an enigma at the moment and that's why we have asked Oliver Peters to take the new Workflow Extension beta for a spin when it becomes available. Hopefully we will be publishing his findings in a fewf weeks.
In the meantime, why don't you head over to the Color Finale site and register so that you'll be the first to know when the beta is released.