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Edit Review: Red Giant Magic Bullet Colorista

Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM, Reviewer: S.D. Katz

NLE plug-in streamlines the color correction process.

A quick look at Magic Bullet Colorista, Red Giant Software's new color correction tool, may leave some people scratching their heads. Don't most NLEs come with a color corrector and scopes? The answer is yes, but there are some good reasons to consider buying this very reasonably priced tool.

Colorista is a plug-in for Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Avid systems for Mac OS X and Windows. It uses the traditional three-way color wheel and operates in 8-, 10-, 16-, and 32-bit systems. You can make rectangular and circular/elliptical masks for secondary correction, and Colorista makes excellent use of OpenGL for realtime performance. However, you'll need to invest in a very fast graphic board to achieve HD performance (720p will work in realtime, but not 1080i).

A different animal

While color correctors may all look the same on the surface, Red Giant dug a bit deeper and modeled its color corrector on the Lift/Gamma/Gain model used in Da Vinci systems, Autodesk Lustre, Quantel iQ, Silicon Color FinalTouch, and other professional grading tools. Currently, the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Technology Committee is exploring making the Lift/Gamma/Gain model the standard correction system format so data can be shared via a color decision list (CDL) that's similar to an EDL. So far, Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro are not compliant with this system, but Colorista is.

Colorista's ASC-compliant color correction engine boils down to one major advantage: changes to color balance in the shadows do not introduce color into the blacks. In Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, and Avid, if you shift the image to a warm tone, you end up contaminating the blacks. Colorista's Lift control, however, leaves the blacks alone when making these types of corrections.

Another major feature that sets Colorista apart is its masks (or Power Windows, as Da Vinci calls them) for secondary color correction. In Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro, there are workarounds for making selective color correction, and in After Effects you can work in layers with powerful masking tools. However, these solutions are all more complex than having power windows built into the color corrector. This becomes a real workflow issue when you are color correcting a feature. You will very quickly appreciate not having to leave Colorista to add a mask when you're correcting several hundred shots — those mouse clicks add up quickly.

Workflow

Because Colorista is a native plug-in and processes in floating point, you can add multiple instances to a single clip without degradation. Try doing that in Final Cut Pro using its color corrector. The ability to create multiple instances of Colorista and rename the filters in After Effects makes for a very powerful workflow. For my money, After Effects plus Colorista could become the core of a digital intermediate workflow, based in part on my betting on Colorista developer/visual effects artist Stu Maschwitz to take the product in that direction.

One other point that Red Giant has stressed is that most digital artists use multiple tools for color correction, moving from After Effects to Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or Avid. That means learning as many as four color correction tools. Red Giant, however, wants Colorista to be your main correction tool, and the company has designed the product to look and work identically on all host programs and operating systems. From my point of view, preservation of the black in shadows is practically the end of the story — that's how important that is to me. So I'll be learning Colorista when I'm not using Nucoda or Lustre. Knowing Maschwitz and Red Giant, I have a great deal of confidence in this product's rapid improvement with all the right moves.

Some limitations

Colorista has both resizable/rotatable rectangular and circular masks with feathering, but there's no way to make free-form masks. Another limitation of Colorista is the lack of frame-store or splitscreen viewing for comparisons. So while the built-in masks for selective correction are very efficient, the need to create workarounds in order to compare the current frame with previous or later frames is a problem. Final Cut Pro, for instance, has a very good split-screen and multiple-window layout for color correction.

Conclusion

Red Giant Software's Magic Bullet Colorista is a 1.0 product and somewhat basic. The product ships with preset styles for color correction and a no-frills PDF manual. In addition to color presets, there is a preset for After Effects so that you can easily use After Effects' tracker to track mattes to the footage. However, a tracker should really be built into Colorista to make the mask tool a complete solution.

Despite a few limitations in the feature set, I'm ready to make Colorista my desktop color corrector of choice. This decision is partly based on my good experience with the Red Giant team and its other products. Highly recommended.

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bottomline

Company: Red Giant Software
Fort Wayne, Ind.; (260) 918-4505
redgiantsoftware.com

Product: Magic Bullet Colorista

Assets: ASC-compliant color correction, maintains integrity of blacks in shadows, operates in Windows and Mac OS X (you'll need Tiger).

Caveats: No splitscreen or comparison windows, no free-form masks, fast graphic board recommended on both operating systems.

Demographic: Anyone with a short project that needs good, basic color correction.

PRICE: $199

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