Bledar Cili

What is the best color grading software?

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Hi Bledar,

Nice to see you here!

I would say that DaVinci is a great tool to start learning if you aren't familar with color correctors or schooled in color theory. Part of the reason is that it's very intuitive, but it's also a lot of great documentation out there as well as tutorials from other users.

The large studios are equipped with both of them, and colorists are drawn between them. Wouldn't say any of them are better than the other, it's like Avid vs. FCP vs. Premiere. You will get the job done. Personally I like the unique control and the way the color management tools work in Baselight, but some tools I find more user friendly in Davinci. Download the trial and try for yourself. 

Abby

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One of the big differences is that Baselight is a layer based system, so if you're used to working with nodes, you may need time to get accustomed to the this way of working. I personally prefer Davinci nodes and general screen layout, but Baselight has very good renderless workflows with Avid software as well as with their range of on-set applications, like Flip and Daylight.

I also have heard from other colourists that Baselight support is much better than what Blackmagic offer.

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It really in the end will boil dow what workflow you have and how fast you can make your grade and with what results.

Coolness is not important property of a tool very long time now imo as any color app or nle is used on blockbusters around the globe. Mostly they are selected by studio job is done or by artist.

 

Some go with Nucoda, some still use Scratch. I bet being confident on number of apps is good idea.

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Thanks Abby for your warm words! Margus, I can only recommend making experiences with other platforms (Scratch & Baselight). When you have the recources and time to do some projects on it, you will see that you can get there easier and more comfortable. Specially on long formats I think it is not to get through to the project in the given time. It is to get it done nicely and to have still energy left to run the extra mile to make it perfect. This you can get with Baselight with all its functionality to make you super efficient (DBS (try, apply, view), "real" Grouped Grading, Smart Dissolve....)

 

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I work in photography/retouching and am currently trying to learn video/colorist tools. I found this quote interesting and wanted to get some thoughts on it. It's from Pascal Dangin who is a notable stills retoucher, owner of Box Studios in NY. http://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/customers/case-studies/film/restless.php

Quote

Dangin notes that he selected Baselight for his grading platform because its toolset closely matches the tools he employs when working with stills. "The RGB color tools in Baselight are the same as the ones you find in traditional still photography applications," he explains. "Most systems rely on separating the gray-scale component of the image from the color information. As such, it does not respect the original photographic intent of the shot."

"Disassociating the two results in an 'un-photographic' look. Whereas in an RGB model, color and contrast are linked the way film is. When you desire less contrast you also change the color saturation."

I haven't used Baselight before but have briefly used Resolve. Mainly so I can translate Resolve's tools into Photoshop equivalents. For instance, Offset/Printer Lights in Resolve = Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer's constant slider. Anyways from what I've found, I seem to prefer the way Resolve handles color vs. Photoshop. The only area where I felt Photoshop really excelled was with Blend Modes like Soft Light which Resolve has now. Has anyone else had any observations while working with curves decoupling luminance/color vs. traditional rgb curves?

 

 

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I would have to agree that you need to develop an eye and watch a lot of films and go to a bunch of museums. You can't work on films and not be able to talk about them. You also find inspiration in other art forms. So a broad understanding of art is great. If you want an over view ... the story of art is a great read. And if your starting to color, you should be learning how to match grade. Single most important skill that will get you working on more projects.

I've graded on resolve, lustre, baselight, and some other smaller platforms. Resolve and baselight have similiar tool sets. My opinion is they only differ at advanced levels. if all your doing is banging on lift/ gama/gain until you have a good image and then keying skin tone and adding a vignette ... you can do it on any platform. If you want to recreate a style of image like a 2-strip look or something that looks like it was run through a telecine with the coring over cranked, you need flexibility in your tool set and  I use the same show lut for every film. So the looks I create are done by manipulating the image layer by layer. The layer system is what makes baselight stand apart. Similar to oil painting, you broad stroke lower layers and fine tune higher layers. Building subtle adjustments layer by layer. I think baselight offers those tools with more depth, flexibility, and overall larger set of options. Plus is aces color science and implementation blows the rest out of the water.

All my pontificating aside, it's a matter of comfort and personal preference. I may find doing something in resolve cumbersome but someone else might think the same process in baselight is cumbersome. 

So I guess ... you can split the diff.

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Anthony Raffaele said:

 

All my pontificating aside, it's a matter of comfort and personal preference. I may find doing something in resolve cumbersome but someone else might think the same process in baselight is cumbersome. 

 

 

Excellent point!

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9 hours ago, Anthony Raffaele said:

Plus is aces color science and implementation blows the rest out of the water.

Great to see you here Anthony! Can you elaborate more on how Aces in Baselight is better than in the other correctors?

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For one, they revamped their color pipeline several years ago to fit more into the aces color model ... idt/working colorspace/odt. You don't have to be using aces to take advantage of their color mapping. You could easily map your r3d files from red log to xyz then color and output a dcp and rec709 pass with minimal adjusting.

They have been constantly updating colorspaces adding a ton of hdr options like HLG (hybrid log gamma). As well as a large selection of display rendering transforms. For those of you who aren't familiar, DRT/RRT's are basically the lut in this style of color work flow. Only smarter! The drt will transform your working color space into any output color space. It maps the points correctly. And this is where the baselight really shines. It's color mapping is so good that when I did the video trim for cafè society we added a half a point of red to the entire film and that was it. (After we did creative adjustments in the video pass but no actual matching).

In their new version they will be adding a "gamma compression" operator. For those of you that have worked in aces, it will help roll back illegal/ negative values. This is an inherent problem in the aces colorspace. It's so big that color literally roll negative and solarize.

I could go on and on technically but one of the main points of understanding these new technologies is to find options and inspiration to help tell the story in front of us. And to find a way to use all the "techno mumbo jumbo" creatively. 

i would also add that resolve and even lustre are creeping their way into ACES. Both can do it. Although ftom what I've seen their ease of use isn't quite there yet.

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hi all,

this thread is really interesting!

I wanted to ask to whoever is already using it if baselight for avid (or nuke) is worth it, how similar is to the proper baselight and what tools are missing.

I mean, I am working in the italian market and there are no baselight in Milan (where i am based), around here is mostly resolve and lustre.

I've always been very curious about baselight (and nucoda and mistika and scratch) as i believe is good to learn how other tools works, unfortunately there is no way to put your hands on this colour tools here where i am, so either the knowledge remain theoretical based on tutorial or  looks like the only real proper affordable solution would be to get a baselight plugin. Unfortunatelly i can't afford 50k+ to get a baselight machine (i wish i could).

What i don't really understand is, if filmlight manage to make a plugin for avid and nuke, why don't do a standalone software as well.

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The baselight for avid plugin is pretty extensive. it has about 95% of the tools set of the regular baselight program. It lacks some major functionality that the baselight proper has, like the ability to compare shots and multi paste corrections. All of the quality of life and speed functionality is missing. That being said, we have a colorist at our facility using it on a case by case basis. 

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I second that. The colour pipeline and toolset of the Baselight Plugin is identical to the full systems. But a huge drawback is the missing timeline and all the workflow tools. It is nice to learn, but to do a full project under pressure might be a bit of pita.

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