Color Finesse vs Colorista 2 Premiere vs After Effects for color correction

Question

Hi,
I want to get in to color correcting of my Canon XF305 footage that is converted to the Blackmagic 10 bits lossless codec.
I have two Eizo calibrated monitors etc , but my only doubt is the choice of the program (to do it in Premiere-pro or After Effects) and with Color Finesse or with Colorista 2.
So if there are people with color correction experience please share it here.
Thanks! David

Answer 1

When shooternz said 'gain' I presume he means "what was the benefit". If your original footage can be opened in PP, converting it isn't usually necessary unless you find the scrub performance is really hampered by the camera's codec - and that's more of an issue for line editing rather than color correction as you won't be playing it back and forth very much. PP will edit in 32-bit color space no matter what the footage is, so you don't need to force the ingested material into a higher bit depth.
We get the 'real time' question asked a lot. PP is a non-linear editor so realtime playback and scrubbing are essential, but the exact content of each frame isn't all that important. AE works on individual frames so it's not designed to play back in real time - it has to compose all your effects onto every single frame before it can show you the results, and in every frame it processes every pixel. The realtime monitors in PP don't do that - they show something that looks visually the same but only some of the frames are actually processed, then the rest are interpolated.
AE has some extremely powerful CC tools, but realistically it's intended for use on small clips - if you look at grading workflows in studios their typical AE timelines might only be 20 seconds max, and often only a couple of seconds. It can work with longer clips but it gets painful. The big advantage in AE is the ability to layer up lots of effects with masks, so for example you can color-correct a video clip so it exactly matches another clip or a still image, fine-tuning one coffee cup in the background of a scene or relighting in post by masking up zones of color and exposure adjustment.
PP on the other hand is great for long timelines and cutting together clips into a program - that's what it's designed for - but it works on clips so correcting at a frame-by-frame level is correspondingly horrible. I'd say the 3-way CC in PP is perfectly fine for prosumer and indie work; if you know what you're doing it's possible to replicate any of the motion picture styles people are used to seeing, it's simply that it doesn't have a library of presets and you don't get the same level of spatial controls (there's no masked adjustment layer concept in PP like there is in AE). As shooternz says some of the third-party plugins for PP give you those power tools.
New in CS6, Speedgrade provides a standalone program with more powerful features, though the workflow at the moment isn't all that seamless (SG wants frame images, as do most pro grading applications, so there's a gnarly export-import thing to go through that makes round-tripping a one way street).
A professional colorist will use a standalone grading program for several reasons, but they're not all down to pure 'quality';
pro colorists tend to use special hardware desks with physical versions of the three color wheels, and they only work with certain software.
if you're matching the 'look' of an entire motion picture, being able to store, share and batch process with preset styles and look-up tables (LUTs) is important - MB Looks and the Colorista plugin bundled with AE both have libraries of presets, the native fast and 3-way CC tools in PP don't.
On a big project the grading is done by someone other than the editor, so they don't generally need (or want) access to the master timeline - they'll get an exported mezzanine format from edit (an image sequence or uncompressed video track) so don't care about all the other stuff PP or AE can do.
If your only job is grading then a standalone package is the way to go. If it's one of an army of things you do, from shooting and editing to burning the DVDs and writing the blog, I'd say to stick with the inbuilt tools in PP/AE, have a go in Speedgrade if you have CS6 and some time to teach yourself, but the expense of a standalone grading tool would only be worthwhile if you have a few months spare to learn the skills. There's a reason the best colorists earn top dollar, it's 50% art, 50% science and 100% dedication.