The Future of Apple Color

I'm going to kick of my grading blog with a few hopes and dreams for the development of Apple Color. It will be two years next April when Apple shocked many by including the once $25,000 application Final Touch, re-badged as Color, in Final Cut Studio 2.

Version 1.04 has just been released and I wanted to talk about some of my hopes for its future development. Color isn't without its problems but as it stands it is a very capable tool in the hands of a competent colourist but what of its future? Will Apple allow it to stagnate with minor upgrades over time or do they have the ambition to transform it into a competitor to the other file based grading solutions? I have to say right away that I fear the former but hope for the latter but we won't know for sure until Final Cut Studio 3 arrives sometime whenever.

Anyway, let's be positive and expect Apple to be feverishly working away at Color 2.0 so I'll have a chat about the features I would like to see in a future version. I've already sent these requests to Apple via the Feedback form and I urge everyone to send their feature requests too.

Colour Consistency.

It's about time Apple took colour management more seriously in their video applications. No more Gamma Shifts round-tripping between FCP and Color. There is no reason why the image should look different even on a DVI monitor in FCP and Color. Sort out the gamma issues that continue to confuse and inflict pain on everyone!

Support the Wave Panel.

Please add support for the Tangent Devices Wave panel. An attractively priced panel that I'm sure many Color users would rush out and buy if it were compatible.

Radical UI Change.

Instead of the "Rooms" where one has to work left to right I'd like a Nodal workflow. I'd like the "Rooms" to become Nodes that can be selected and mixed and matched in which ever order I want.

Secondary Room.

Hue control confined to matte selection and/or vignette. Unlimited number of tabs, sometimes 8 is just not enough if one is painting with vignettes. I would also like to be able to change the ordering of the secondary tabs dynamically just like Safari tabs. Add a blur parameter to the secondary room too.

Color FX Room.

Shouldn't we just have Shake here? Along with all of Color's nodes add all of Shake's nodes here. I find matte generation woefully inadequate in Color. The ability to bring in external mattes from Mocha would be fantastic not only to have external mattes but to be able to circumvent Color's horrid geometry room and trackers. Boolean operators to combine and subtract mattes would be hugely beneficial too.

Additionally the ColorFX room should move to the Secondary Room and be available to each tab. This assumes my Nodal workflow doesn't happen and the UI remains the same as it is now.

Geometry Room.

I never thought I'd pine for Shake's roto tools but that's what I do regularly when faced with using Color's. The tracker is also dog slow and inaccurate so should be changed immediately. Why not include Shake's tracker code?

The biggest improvement to this room would be to allow 3rd party tracking data and roto shapes, a Shake SSF importer.

Round Trip.

Complete FCP timeline compatibility. All CODECs, Motion clips, blend modes and timewarps be allowed inside Color. Editing of the timeline should also be possible for those last minute changes of mind which do happen after picture lock mid grade.

Audio.

I know there are those that say they couldn't care less about grading with audio well I'm not one of those. Audio provides clues for grading choices and should be added. Even it is just a RAM preview at least the director/client would get an idea of the final programme with synced audio prior to rendering the whole sequence out. OpenCL and Grand Central (below) might mean RT grading with audio without rendering? We can live in hope.

Snow Leopard.

OpenCL and Grand Central are two key technologies that could revolutionise the FCS suite. Color could definitely benefit from both especially if multiple graphics cards could be installed in a Mac Pro and then be utilised under Open CL. Da Vinci's Resolve system uses nVidia's CUDA technology to awesome effect (20 layers of 4k in RT!). Of course I'm not expecting that sort of performance from a couple of GPGPUs in a Mac Pro but significant performance increases would be possible. Fully embracing the technologies in Snow Leopard could make Color a very powerful tool.

What have I missed?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Guy