FCP Color Grading: coremelt chromatic vs. color finale

These two color grade tools look pretty similar. I think the Coremelt one is new. Has anyone done a comparison or a have an un-biased opinion? Does not have feature the other does not (e.g. tracking). Which one is easier to use?

I'm new to grading, not a pro. I'm intermediate skilled at FCP. I've taken all the tutorials on Resolve, but roundtripping to FCP just looks like too much work for a non-professional, want to stay FCP.

Good question,

I hear that Coremelt Chromatic is better in Performance then Color Finale but Color Finale has the ability to use the X-Rite Colorchecker which Chromatic CAN'T.

… and Chromatic comes with a built-in tracker, if you want to apply CCs to moving parts in the frame; therefor offers - btmk - CF so-called 'vectors' which are handy to get rid of 'hues' in some colours (the infamous Panavision magenta skies effect).

For a beginner, may I suggest the free 18 lectures at
www.colorgradingcentral.com/final-cut-pr...ng-table-of-contents

It gives a first but profound nose-dip into CC, with FCPX' built-in colour-board (although it's on ColorFinales website) …

I tried the chromatic demo. It's really slow compared to color finale. Curves and wheels have poor responsiveness and I'm on a 2013 Mac pro with 12 giga of vram and 32 giga of ram. It's a pity because the plugin has more features than color finale but, IMHO, it's really too sluggish to work with. Color finale is still the best in terms of performances even with his little ui bugs and lack of tools like the tracker and specialised curves.

I've been beta testing it from the start. It outperforms Color Finale on the systems I've timed it on. My main system is the same as yours, with D700 GPUs, so it's odd to hear it is sluggish. Details?

X-Rite support is coming, but future features are based on demand. There's more demand for hardware controller support, so that's coming first.

I'm very curious about the spec involved with a system where Chromatic is sluggish. Contact Coremelt, they'd be very interested in working on that.

FCPX.guru wrote: I've been beta testing it from the start. It outperforms Color Finale on the systems I've timed it on. My main system is the same as yours, with D700 GPUs, so it's odd to hear it is sluggish. Details?

X-Rite support is coming, but future features are based on demand. There's more demand for hardware controller support, so that's coming first.

I'm very curious about the spec involved with a system where Chromatic is sluggish. Contact Coremelt, they'd be very interested in working on that.

I am very interested in your experience with Chromatic performance on a 2013 Mac Pro with D700 GPUs. I have that computer and clips to which I’ve applied Chromatic play back with so many dropped frames as to make Chromatic unusable (unless I render such clips each time I make a change.) I reported this to Coremelt, who replied that its a known issue effecting the D700 equipped Mac Pro. They don’t know when they will have a fix. So, to fcpx.guru, you have such a Mac; are you not having dropped frames on playback? I’m running version 412 of Chromatic; do you by chance have a later, beta version? Thanks.

Just to chime in with my experience: I am operating off essentially the same specs as others - 3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5, dual AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB, and 64G RAM - OS X SIerra 10.12.6, FCPX 10.3.4.

I use both ColorFinale Pro and Chromatic - latest versions of each. ColorFinale Pro exhibits the minor bugs others have reported and Chromatic is very sluggish, almost unusable, on my recent project. The material was XAVC-I QFHD 23.98 - captured in S-log3. As mentioned above, I had to render every correction I made in Chromatic to get the footage to play back normally.

Yes, Chromatic is not as slick with playback on the current Mac Pros, but I've personally not see "horrible" playback, to the point of not being usable. But the same Mac can have a million different variables depending on other software, system settings, external hardware, etc. That is the worst case I've heard of. But yes, will be fixed soon. Personally, I don't get the back performance. Coremelt has gathered my specs for their research.

But as someone just stated, Color Finale Pro on my system is worse, much more so than Chromatic. Again, many variables to be researched to formulate a fix.

I'm using H.264 1080 and 4K from DJI P4 and I2, GoPro, Osmo, and ProRes from BMD 4K Production and Pocket cameras and iPhone 7 and 7+ footage. Complex stacks sometimes I render, but simple (which is 90% of what I need) corrections play back just fine. Just FYI.

As stated, Coremelt is working very hard on Chromatic, it has a ways to go, there's a lot in the plans for it, lots on the list of things to add/tweak.

FCPX.guru wrote: As stated, Coremelt is working very hard on Chromatic, it has a ways to go, there's a lot in the plans for it, lots on the list of things to add/tweak.

I can not imagine that Color Grading Central is not working hard on Color Finale FCPX!
Plans are plans we will see. But I might be picking up Color Finale first since it has the features that many want that don't exist in Chromatic.