Is Color Finale 2 Worth It or Can You Color Grade with FCPX Only?

hey filmmakers today we're gonna take a look at color finale two and compare it side-by-side with the features that are built into Final Cut Pro 10 that way you can make a decision on whether or not this is a plugin that would be useful for you when it comes time to color so the first test we're gonna do is how quickly can you do a basic color correction on log footage and this was all shot on the brand-new Fujifilm XT 4 so we'll start off with Final Cut Pro 10 and then after that we'll immediately see how quickly we can do the same thing inside of color finale 2 so the first thing we're gonna do is drag a clip onto the timeline and as you can see obviously this is ungraded it's very flat so I want to do a really quick color correction to this using Final Cut Pro Tools only so in the upper right I'm going to click on the color tab and then from the drop down I'm going to go to the color wheels and the first thing I'm going to do is add a little bit of contrast so it will drag these shadows down that looks pretty good then we're gonna drag the highlights up alright and then we're gonna do a master saturation the left here somewhere around about 50% and that looks pretty good and then finally I do want to do a quick color correction on it so I'm gonna click on the magic wand here drop down do balance color and you can see that's improved it quite a bit but I'm gonna select the drop down for automatic and change it to white balance which then gives us an eyedropper so I can actually custom select here the white strip on our color checker and that looks pretty good I think I'm gonna go back into color wheels and bring down the highlights just a little bit because I think I gave it too much there before doing the white balance yeah so for a basic quick color correction I think that does a pretty good job just adding a little bit of contrast saturation and getting it white balance properly now let's see how quickly we can do the exact same thing but using color finale - so we're gonna drag the same clip into the timeline so we have that flat F lock footage and then in the lower right hand corner I'm going to go to the effects and type in finale and then we'll drag color finale Pro on to the clip and then from the inspector in the upper right hand corner I'm going to first add some contrast and this is a great feature something that definitely makes this program different than just Final Cut Pro tens built-in features is this contrast slider and I really like this it does actually a really good job of adding contrast the way that I like to see it come in so I'm gonna put it about 17 maybe 18 and then we can do a white balance and I'm actually just gonna do an auto white balance you see that's cooled it off quite a bit and then we're gonna drag the saturation slider and I'm gonna do this to about 1.5 so about 50 percent more saturation similar to what we did previously and then another great feature is this sharpness slider so if you wanted to add a bit of sharpness you could do that here I'm not going to and that's a feature that is not built into Final Cut Pro with a nice slider like that so that's pretty cool all right so let's play this one back now and I think that looks pretty good so I want to see them side by side how do each of these color Corrections look it's it's crazy because they actually look pretty different and I think that all comes down to the way that each of these were automatically white balanced by their programs so final cut the way that it white balance this is quite a bit warmer as well as the saturation in this cactus back here and in this like little sky scene is not nearly as bright and poppy but the color finale one has much more bright colors you know getting more of that bright purpley magenta color in the sky and then that cactus is really popping and I think the skin tones look more natural as well they're not nearly as warm between these two tests I think if you're going to do a really quick color grade I think that color finale definitely does a better job maybe this could use a teeny bit more exposure so I'm gonna drag that up just a hair I could use a little bit more to match the other shot it's brightness a little bit more for the next test we're gonna see how well each of these handles applying Luntz to our footage so we're gonna grab another clip and drag it onto our timeline and I'm going to apply a LUT to this using Final Cut only tools so from the lower right in the effects browser I'm going to type in light and then I'm gonna drag a custom lock onto the clip and then from the upper right hand corner I'm gonna click on the LUT drop down and then I'm going to select choose custom light and this will open up my finder and this is where all of my nuts are saved currently on my computer and the bummer about this is I have no clue how it's gonna look on the footage because I don't have any preview or anything like that and as you can see there's like a ton in here there's probably a hundred different left in here so I'm gonna choose one that I've used in the past and I know works pretty well this fj color f13 from t let's and i'll go ahead and select open and that looks pretty good already we're getting a lot of nice contrast and saturation to the image now if you don't want to apply it to 100% you just can slide down this mix slider go down to 50 or you know bring it all the way down to zero if you want but I'm gonna leave it up at 100% now let's see how quickly you can apply a lot using color finale so I'm going to drag the same clip onto the timeline and then in the lower-right and effects again I'm going to type in finale bring up color finale Pro drop it on and then from the inspector I'm going to scroll down until we get to layers click on edit layers and then this is where we can apply a lot you click on this little four squares here now the cool thing about color finale two is that it automatically pulls up all your let's view that are already installed on the computer you don't have to go looking for them and it gives you a live preview of how it will look on your footage which is just amazing because if you have a lot of Luntz like I do and you want to see how they're gonna look in real time you can just scroll through them and see hey which one's gonna look the best on my footage which one do I like the most and it just makes it really easy to actually visualize how things are going to look and if you can't find the one that you're looking for you can type it in if you know the name of it so I'm gonna apply the same lot that I did with the first clip and that's the FJ color F 13 I can already see what its gonna look like from the preview and hit insert now it's on at 100% and if I want to turn that down from the lower left there's this 100% slider and I can do the same thing and drag that down to 50 or all the way down to zero but I'm gonna bring it all the way back up to 100% and you can see from this test already that color finale Pro again is the huge winner here because it gives you live previews of how your LUT is gonna look on your footage which i think is just amazing and definitely worth it okay the next comparison we're gonna do here is applying mask to our footage so that you can color adjust specific portions of your clip so let's drag another clip onto the timeline here we're gonna see how it looks to add a mask just using Final Cut Pro Tools and this is going to be a color grading mask so you're going to click in the upper right hand corner of the inspector on the color and then the drop down for color board and then you'll see the icon for mask you're gonna go ahead and click on that and from the drop down click on add shape mask now from here really all's it gives you is basically a circle and you can manipulate the shape of it to be a little bit more oval and ellipsoidal but it doesn't actually allow you to really draw the exact shape of your mask so I'm just going to go ahead and put it over our subjects face and then this outer ring is the feather so if you want it to really have a nice fall off I'm gonna drag that out a bit so it's not nearly as obvious and like a harsh line and then from the inspector you can see masks and you can color great the inside of the mask or outside of the mask so we're gonna color grade inside of the mask and I'm going to raise the exposure on her face just a bit so that it's a little bit more bright and then I'm gonna drop the shadows a little bit so it's a little bit more contrast II and let's raise the highlights a little bit as well so I haven't done any other color correcting on this footage so it's still actually completely flat and maybe it'd be a good idea to apply a lot or something to this so we can see what it looks like so now I'm going to on/off this color board so you can see how it's made a difference on her face a little bit brighter okay but if I want to add another mask to this I can do that by clicking on the little mask icon again in the top right and click add shape mask and then it gives me another one which you know I could bring up over here and let's say that I wanted to bring up the brightness or something on this light post or something I could do that or I could you know maybe change the color or something of it by doing that but what the issue here is when you're using final cut whatever changes I make to this let's say that I want to bring up the exposure on it it also makes that change to the other mask that's inside of this color board so your face will go way up in brightness and so does that light pulse so they're paired together which is obviously a problem because I want to color grade them individually now you can keyframe this let's say that she's moving around and we want the mask to follow her you can keyframe it from the right hand corner here you can see where there's a little add a keyframe button so you could do that and scrub along and you have to do it all completely manually but you could move the mask along and make keyframes as you go to move this mask but honestly I think that using color grading masks with just the final cut tools is pretty clunky and a little bit limited so now let's see how well they work inside of color for now again I'm gonna grab this same clip and drag it into the timeline and then I'm going to drag color finale pro onto the clip and we'll go into the inspector scroll down and it is inside of edit layers we're where we're gonna get the masks and so first you have to select what kind of color grade you want to do so I'm gonna do a curves adjustment and I'm also gonna put a lot on there again so we can see how well it looks and just gonna go ahead and get that applied and then let's do our curves adjustment so I'm gonna put a couple points on our line here and add just a little bit more contrast and try to brighten up the top so the face is a little bit more bright and exposed now we want to add a mask so that that color adjustment just applies to everything within the mask so I'm gonna click on the mask icon here in the bottom then you can see that nothing's happening you need to click on the mask icon in the layer again and that'll bring up all of the mask tools on the left hand side you can see all the different ways that you could draw a mask on to it and it also shows you the frame where it's at I'm gonna do a shape mask again just similar how we did with final cuts you can see how it compares and I'll go ahead and drag that on now one thing I don't like about this is that it doesn't actually allow you to drag an outer layer of the circle for the feathering I think that's a great thing about final cuts and you can easily do that so instead to adjust the feathering you go to the right here where it says feathering and I'm going to do it at about 50% and then an opacity right now is set to 100 that might be a little too much I'm gonna go to 70% that'll bring down the amount of the effect so it looks a little bit more natural runs off a little bit better now the awesome thing about color finale is that it can actually track your mask all for you using the computer it has you know tracking software built into it so if she moves her face or the subject moves around whatever it is that your color grading it can track that area so it's area mask tracking so in order to do that now that I've put the mask on you just hit the play button and it will track forward the entire thing for you now this takes some time because obviously it's some computer processing to do this but it will track every single-frame for you so that you don't have to go in and individually add keyframes every single time your subject moves that you're applying a color grade to so this is huge and absolutely one of the features that makes color finale the most worth it alright now I'm going to show you a couple of features that are exclusively built into color finale Pro and they don't have any alternative inside of just the Final Cut Pro features and so this first one is the color checker so I'm going to drag color finale Pro onto this and then we are using the X right color checker video passports and it just has the longest name ever for whatever reason but these things are awesome for getting proper colors and getting proper exposure and everything like that so I highly recommend picking one up and just putting it in the frame of whatever it is that you're shooting for the first couple seconds so later on you can get a perfect color grade I'm going to scroll down until we get to color chart and then I'm going to click show so I'm going to select color checker passport video and then we're actually going to draw a box around this so I'm gonna zoom in first here alright and then just you line up all these little boxes with each of the color chips and once you've done that click match charts and enable match and then I can see that it's already color corrected this footage so let's zoom back out so we can get an idea of what this is gonna look like let's on/off it here so we can see what the grade did so it definitely added saturation and contrast to the image but personally I think that it still looks way too warm her skin tones and her shirt looks extra warm which i think is a little bit strange so it's a good idea to do a white balance on this as well so I'm just gonna hit Auto and see how colorful Milan handles that so there we go that looks much much more natural and everything's cooled off quite a bit it could still use some adjustments I think that the colorchecker analysis and kind of matching up with that is decent but it's definitely not perfect I still like to do all my color grades completely custom but if you just want something really quick this does an okay job and it may be a starting point for you if you're not very good at color grading already one of the next cool features that's built in here is under image analysis so click on show and then we can actually toggle on and off a false color which if you're used to using false colors on a monitor this is a great way to see how well your image is exposed another cool feature is under film emulation so if you want your footage to look a little bit more vintage you can add some grain to it and this is an awesome little feature here because I know a lot of people love having that grain look and that vintage look so there's just a lot of little sliders here you can you know add a certain amount of grain the size how much it responds to the grain as the film moves you can even add color to the grain and of course adjust the grain rate so you could do all of that I'm gonna go full screen here and see if you guys can you know actually get an idea of what the grain looks like to sum it up I think that color finale pro is definitely worth it if you want to get really detailed in your color grading and your color Corrections because it has some features that you just can't get with Final Cut Pro 10 so if you are interested in picking up the plug-in definitely check out the link in the description below and guys if you want to see more videos like this please subscribe right now because I have a ton more videos coming out on editing shooting lighting everything like that and you don't want to miss it all right I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Chadwin Smith

Views: 9,898

Keywords: Is Color Finale 2 Worth It or Can You Color Grade with FCPX only, color finale, color finale 2, color finale pro, fcpx, final cut pro x, how to color grade, how to colorgrade, how to color grade in fcpx, how to use color finale, how to color correct video, how to color correct in fcpx, how to white balance in fcpx, how to edit video colors, chadwin smith, cinematography, x rite color checker video passport, x rite, color checker for video, color checker photography

Id: JHLzLtL6wH8

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020