This is some test footage with my DJI Osmo+ at Stony Point Park. It was shot with auto exposure as I have yet to get any ND filters to stop own the exposure. And the first shot was wrongly white balanced. It was shot with D-Log, Sharpness 0, Saturation -2 and Contrast -2.
This is the color corrected shot.
This is a comparison as shot and color corrected.
I shot some test footage with 3 of my cameras, my DJI OSMO+ my Canon 60D and my iPhone 6S. I color corrected the footage using DaVinci Resolve 12.5 and did the Visual Effects in Adobe After Effects.
The visual effects include adding the gun shots, light flashes, and color correcting the orange tip of my gun so it is gray.
I was trying to show my ability to color match the footage from such different 3 cameras, as well as add the visual effects to make an interesting little sequence.
Let me know what you think!
I have made a lot of posts about Adobe needing to upgrade SpeedGrade, but I had been using it with premiere Pro 2014. And with Direct link to Adobe SpeedGrade you could send your sequence and do a full grade in SpeedGrade, then send it back to Premiere and it showed up as a Lumetri Grade Filter on the clips. It was awesome!
Sure DaVinci Resolve is more powerful, but mainly because it has been consistently upgraded. There are still some things that I like better in SpeedGrade, like not only overall grading controls, but the same controls in light, medium and dark. I love just being able to increase contrast and saturation in just the mids! And the best features was Direct Link because the grade came back to Premiere, instead of being a rendered export from Resolve, making itinerant version changes much easier in commercials so much easier!
What I hadn’t realized because I was using SpeedGrade with an earlier Creative Cloud, was that not only have try not upgraded SpeedGrade, but in Premiere Pro 2015.3 they removed Direct Link to SpeedGrade!?!?!? So it is obviously gone in 2017.
Sure they have put some Lumetri controls in Premiere, but nothing like SpeedGrade. You can do color corrects, but the controls are very dumbed down, and not nearly as powerful! With most of the masking controls gone, and such simple controls, it is no replacement for SpeedGrade! And while DaVinci Resolve stills works great, the loss of Direct Link is a huge minus! There is of course a thread about it at Adobe Forums, but I doubt adobe is listening!
Honestly this move is so very Apple like. Exactly like Apple buying Shake, making it affordable, then gutting it for the smallest technology out of it. Or Apps buying FinalTouch, turning it into color and killing it. Or killing Final Cut Pro 7 for iMovie Pro, oops, I mean Final Cut Pro X.
And the best part is that while SpeedGrade could use some upgrades, even without them it is still so much more powerful than Lumetri controls in Premiere Pro!
Adobe has made a huge mistake in losing it’s powerful color correction tool. It is a huge sore point missing in Creative Cloud now.
BlackMagicDesign’s Davinci Resolve 12.5.1 has been released and it includes Quicktime ProRES decoding on Windows! You can check out all the new features here.
With Apple having ended Quicktime support for Windows, and now Adobe and DaVinci adding Quicktime Pro Res playback on Windows, that basically means that you can use all the old ProRes files you have, but it is time to move on. And it is unfortunate as ProRES HQ had really become a great intermediate format and ProRES 444 is an awesome alpha format.
And it looks like it is time to move to AVID’s DNxHD format, since like ProRES it is pretty much visually lossless at higher bitrates.
Blackmagic Designs have released Davinci Resolve 12. It is still Free for the Lite version, $995 for the full version or $29,995 for the full version including the full control surface.
The new version has a new interface that is supposed to be easier on the eyes.
It has multi-cam editing, that allows real time editing.
It has also updated it’s editing mode, with an improved Trim Mode and more.
And it now has a new audio engine for better realtime playback.
And of course grading improvements.
RedShark has an article on all of BlackMagic Designs exciting new announcements from IBC 2014.
My personal favorites are:
DaVinci Resolve 11.1 is out now.
And BlackMagic has purchased Eyeon Software the maker of Fusion the high end digital compositing, visual effects and Motion Graphics Software! Wow, and lets hope they do to it exactly what they have been doing with Resolve, make it better, and cheaper than ever! Let’s hope they eventually have a free version with full Resolve back and forth for an amazing new free or affordable compositing program! And lets hope for a Mac version very soon!
Fusion looks insane. Node based, but their Sizzle Reel stills looks very very complicated!
It supposedly already supports CUDA for acceleration so it sounds like a great fit with Resolve.
ProVideo Coalition has the news on both.
And DaVinci Resolve 11 Beta has been released with more editing features.
After learning DaVinci Resolve, and being incredibly impressed with it, I decided to learn Adobe SpeedGrade for it’s integration with Adobe Premiere Pro (my current choice of edit software), but so far I have been less than impressed.
First off with Resolve and a good NVIDIA Cuda card, the program works great with BlackMagic or AJA video cards, is rocket fast and you get a recreation of the timeline from your edit program, and can remove shots as needed, or do basic editing. And you have such a great collection of edit controls and presets.
With SpeedGrade you only get a single video track (or 3 if you have dissolves or transitions as it puts the a & B on different tracks and the transition in between). So you need to prep your sequence, and the send from Premiere is even weirder. Instead of using the original media files, it converts everything into uncompressed DPX image sequences, which will take up a huge amount of space (uncompressed files after all) and it bakes in any effects you applied into the clips. So it basically ignores the awesome Mercury playback Engine from premiere, and it’s only real bonus is that your color correction returns to premiere as a filter applied to the clips.
You can work with original premiere pro clips, but not with the send from premiere command, instead you need to export and EDL from Premiere and import the clips into SpeedGrade that way.
And there there is the fact that it doesn’t export video a monitor using Black Magic video cards, only AJA! This sucks. It should work with everything Premiere Pro does!
And as for the color correction, the lack of curves is inexcusable! Curves are such a powerful color corrector and Adobe needs to fix this right away.
I know Adobe purchased this program to compete with Apple Color (now defunct) and DaVinci Resolve and round out their suite, but I would rather see them base the whole program on the amazing Mercury Playback engine from Premiere Pro, instead of having this current attempt at integrating the two programs, which seems more like a cludge than reel integration. Yes, having the color correction return as plug in corrections is very very cool, but so far that is really the only thing cool i am seeing about SpeedGrade.
I have not fully explored or gotten proficient with the program, and I will report back once I have, but so far my initial impressions don’t make me consider moving away from Resolve for my color correction needs.
Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.
The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it’s ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it’s abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it’s ability export it’s grades as color correction filters into Premiere.
BlackMagic has announced version 11 of DaVinci Resolve. And of course the Lite version is still free for up to 1080 video and $995 for higher resolution, 3D and noise reduction features.