Apple Color

Once you spend money, you always have to spend more. I'm not sure why it works that way, but it just does. I bought Michael Wohl's (expensive) book on Apple color today and started working with the software. I learned a lot just by going through a couple of chapters. While reading the text I finally made a connection between the 3-way Color corrector and Photoshop's Levels command. At the basic level, they do the same thing and for some reason, it never occurred to me before.

Working with Color was baffling at first but it now makes sense following Wohl's well-written and informative tutorials. My test color grades of noise film look much better than my previous grades. This is strange considering that in FCP I was essentially doing the same thing with the 3-way color corrector. Maybe it's because I'm better at using the scopes now. One thing that surprised me was how much you can do with the scopes alone, even without looking at your image. It's almost like learning how to fly by instruments. Already, I can sense that going through this process is giving the project more consistency. It's kind of fun working in Color but there is a fatal flaw. Color wants to be last in the production pipeline because you have to render files before going back to FCP. It looks like there is no way to tweak color corrections. If you want to make changes you have to work on the sequence again from scratch.

I'm still finding all sorts of things in the footage now that I'm seeing it big. The grain's changing all the time. Some shots—little grain. Other shots—lots of grain. I'm also seeing little things like brushstrokes on the props which weren't visible at the smaller size. In one shot I found the Omni light in the background and you can sort of read "Omni."