COLOR has serious problems

Question

Just finished my first color grading job in COLOR. I'll never subject myself to that kind of pain again.
This was a simple scene to scene CC job captured from digibeta with BM 10bit at 29.97. The footage was a final & locked edit for a network show.
Used FCP to cut up the edit then SEND to color with a resounding crash, every time.
So, I reloaded the entire FCP suite and ran the updates, tried again, same results.
With the deadline looming large, I imported the entire clip into color and cut it up there. And did all CC work... it was perfect, yeah, until the output.
Using SEND to FCP didn't crash! But the fun was over when I checked it against the orginal edit. Every edit was clipped by 1 frame at the end. Plus the extra bonus of FCP putting 5 frame gaps between each edit. Yes, yes the frame rates, image size, pixel aspect and interlace where the same between Color and FCP and the source footage.
So, now it's 8pm the runner from the show has now been waiting for an hour, my phone is ringing every 5 mins with producers screaming.
now what do ya do?
Yep, exactly, I went back to COLOR and rendered 65 stills of the last frame of each edit. then dumped all 65 back into fcp. and TA-DA! it was finished.
But, still not exactly a happy ending. It seems that color did something to the images causing them to look soft, like a compression or ?
Someday COLOR will be a useful tool... Meanwhile it's back to ae for cc, uhhhggg

Answer 1

I find these kinds of posts bemusing! It's always the same thing - 'Color ruined my life when I had deadline!' I think there are a couple of things that people should bear in mind with Color...
Color was developed from a very specific industry tool, Final Touch, which was never designed to be an application that anyone could just jump on in with, have a play around and expect everything to work. Although it is an extremely sophisticated tool it's also fairly crudely put together, quite the opposite to something like Motion for instance which can be driven by a five year old without too much danger of breaking anything. In the case of Color I think you really have to read the manual properly, take time to prepare your material for use in the application, and doing some testing during some downtime.
As far as practical advice would go for your case in particular: If the 'send to' was crashing it might suggest an XML export issue. Did you make sure that there were no elements in the sequence that Color cannot handle? Nested sequences in particular will screw up an XML export.
Did you specify handle lengths within Color? Easily missed but I had a similar issue a while back with each last frame rendering out corrupt - solved by adding handles.
Also I know that Autosave has in the past caused some frame rendering issues so I just leave it off now.
On the whole I've had a mixed experience with Color but what I have learned is that the user has to share some responsibility and make sure they are fully prepared when using the app.
Hope that's a help!