Cinema Grade ?

Anyone has tried Cinema Grade from Denver Riddle ?

I always felt that Color Finale was an unfinished product... so I'm quite unsure about trying something new from him.

Yes, it is fantastic, and I'm posting to my blog about how it saved a TV show. There are instances I need to do touch-ups with the FCPX color wheels, but for the most part, it works different, and I'm sold.

Never heard of that before this thread. Casey Farris gives an overview:


I think this is worth a big applause. Color is very important for me, and I often wrote that I found the 10.4 CC workflow not comfortable. I definitely try this, I think the whole idea is awesome. It even has a good match function.

Thank you ! Does it replace Color Finale in your opinion ?

No, because there are no color wheels or anything to dial in color like that. I've just graded three TV shows with CG and in some shots I needed to use FCPX's color wheels along with CG to dial color in correctly. But it is an amazing tool, and very fast to use. I'd say that it enhances the grading process, it doesn't replace anything.

The fullscreen mode with the shortcuts is spot-on in terms of what people with only one display would naturally want (MacBook, iMac). As far as I can see, it should be an option within FCP itself.

Also, I can only hope that 10.5 will have well thought-out compare&match features as well as easy-to-use ‘save the grade’ methods (colored dots in CG).

If I didn’t miss that, CG lacks keyframes. So once again, a genius idea remains somewhat halfbaked.

There is a keyframe button in the FCPX Inspector, but it doesn't seem to do much. Since this is a version 1, I'm going to assume that is coming, like shoes in the base correction window are. Denver tells me there's a very aggressive development plan for CG.

Thanks for the interest around Cinema Grade ! Software developer here. Thank you kindly for bearing in mind this is only our first software release and we are listening and implementing feedback quickly. In fact our most popular feature request (to add scopes to Base Correction and Final Grading page) we will be adding later this week! I think what it really comes down to is giving it try and seeing for yourself if it is right for you and your workflow. We can do more than we ever could before because we are not limited by plugin architecture. We are in our own app so ideas and concepts we couldn't explore up until now we able to explore and quickly implement rather than being MacGyver in a sandbox with only a few toys. The sky is the limit in the tools we can build for you now

Good news, Denver. I‘m on vacation right now. Looking forward to test this very promising app. Sent my Premiere buddy (uses Lumetri) an E-mail, and he was very disappointed when he finally saw there was no Windows version. I think this will be a success.

I have a blog post coming out sometime this week about how CG saved our asses at the TV station three times in one day. Got through some basic grading so fast it made me dizzy. Scopes would be huge.

I have another request, some way to work with it to compare inside the Multicam Clip editor. We do lots of interview multi cams (two to three angles) and need to color match them. I have a workaround (will be in the blog post), and not sure how you'd implement that. But it is a need, so I'm mentioning it here.

Really loving this plugin...I bought it for the grading but the grouping is just wonderful, so quick and handy... using it all the time Wondering if those scopes in base correction are really going to make it this week?

Johnny

Thanks guys for the continued support and interest. Really looking forward to your post Ben! We delayed releasing an update with the scopes (which are actually even better and update in realtime) on a Friday simply because if we ran into any hiccups heaven forbid we'd rather be in a position where we can help people (office is closed on weekends). So that will becoming up real shortly. Glad that you are enjoying the groups Seachas. WE have found that a lot of people don't take advantage of using groups simply because in current implementations and in general they are really confusing. We feel that we have solved that problem in a very natural straight forward way because people have to match clips anyway so by getting them to organize which clips should get matched together they are also creating groups without really even realizing it Easy peazy lemon squeezy!

Cheers,
Denver

Impressed so far. Have test version 1.0.15.
Really useable only with said scopes of course. Add alt+k to keyframe on current position, and there was little if anything that forced me to use any other CC tools.

I find I'm having to throw FCPX's color wheels in after CG on half of my grades. You simply can't adjust coloring. You can white balance with temperature and tint, but you can't actually "color" with only those two tools.

It is saving me a lot of time on much of the fast turnaround work at the TV station. Not sure if I want color wheels in CG, as the way I imagine it, it would get too cluttered to end up being too limited.

Like the scopes, don't love them. They're a good rough estimate reference, but the FCPX scopes are much more detailed and accurate.

This is an amazing tool to have in my color grading arsenal, but I wouldn't not say it's the only tool I need all of the time.

Looking forward to its evolution over time. And yeah, keyframing would be a nice touch.