Well, having a spent a day with it, the program is good but buggy and does not integrate with Premiere. If they fix a few things, it will be a "wow" item. Lots of BSODs :) You basically have to render out lossless to SG, then re-import the footage and add titles, etc. So if you want to tweak a fade, forget it. Also, you can't import MP4 or mts files. Hello? But the grading is very nice.

"Any advantage over DaVinci Resolve?" that´s what I would like to know too.. any colorists here who use both resolve and speedgrade?

Thanks Mark--I tried a small test project and ran into all sorts of problems. The main issue was that exporting a project to DPX files (which, as you say, were ginormous) created tiny little cross fade patches between clips that had to be independently graded or the graded clip would "jump" when it hit the CF area. Did you find a way of dealing with this problem? I guess if there was a way to use Cineform files instead of DPX files that would be a possibility.

@DrDave I'm using Vegas pro 11 but since the integration is probably just about as nonexistent as it is for any other NLE, I'm sure my experience will be similar to using Speedgrade with any other editing software.

I tried using it on a series of six videos for a project about young children working with orchestral players because I wanted to make footage captured in difficult conditions, look as good as possible. The camera skills for this sort of observational footage are quite different from normal - they require a knowledge of which aspects of children's development you want to shot, and also of course there are child protection issues. The camera person used Canon XHA1 cameras because she had used them before, and I was happy to lend them the XHA1 and not my GH2. To make a story out of this (shot in quite difficult circumstances in a room full of toddlers and babies) each resulting video had a largish number of quite complex edits, which are a mix of split audio / video edits as well as non-sync sound and sync sound from an H4n and from an on-camera Sennheiser gun mic. The finished videos were between 1 minute and 4 minutes in length, and some of them also incorporated some SD footage which was captured by the client along with HD (ish) footage from an XHA1 camcorder. So a bit of a potpourri - and then it all has to be vetted by the client and by an academic expert in child's musical play.

Having chosen, synced and then edited the footage in Vegas, for cases where it was just cuts, I then exported my edited timeline to DNxHD. Imported that into Speedgrade, ran scene detection and did the grading, then exported the graded version, again in DNxHD, and put that back into Vegas to add final titles and fades at the beginning and end of the entire piece.

For cases where there were crossfades, it was a bit more complex because I was worried about the footage getting out of sync as well as about the issue you mentioned at the CF region. So to make it easy, at each crossfade I moved that clip up one track in the Vegas timeline so I had an overlap of a few seconds between the outgoing and incoming video. At each subsequent crossfade I did the same, so ending up with a chequerboard of two tracks. Then I essentially exported two video-only timelines of identical length, one for each of the two tracks. Of course there were lots of "holes" in each one. I put these two one after the other on the SG timeline so I could compare all the grades I applied (copying and pasting those which were similar). Then I exported them as two separate files and put them onto two new tracks in Vegas, synced them up with the original material (as they were two complete timelines, I just needed to sync each one once) then cut them up so they replicated the original edit and reconstruced the crossfades (except of course now they were all the graded versions). I'm hugely hoping that someone on here will point out a much better, more automated way of doing this but the sound edit was so complex I really didn't want to run into sync problems and this was a simple way of avoiding that happening.

Although I liked using Speedgrade, it was quite easy to lose track of this project and going back and altering something could have been easier if I'd known my way around Speedgrade a bit more. I am a ColorGHear member but as I'm not very familiar with AE and because Speedgrade seems pretty intuitive, I thought I'd use that on this project. It was worth it as a learning experience, but probably for this project it absorbed far too many hours of extra playing around given I was only being paid for 2 days editing. With better integration into the editing workflow it would be amazing - and Speedy!

Speedgrade definitely lives up to its name, as a very fast method of grading. My only gripe is that it's not as tightly integrated with Premiere as I would like. Surprised that they didn't include in Dynamic Link support, with per-clip grading. Until they add support for Dynamic Link, I'm sticking to Magic Bullet.

@DrDave Yes, that's it exactly. You don't have to render two complete tracks back out of Speedgrade and break it back up into clips once back in the NLE, but if you do then everything is back where it belongs. And yes if you allow as much overlap as possible in your graded files, you have flexibility of CF duration when reconstructing the crossfades in your NLE.

You are absolutely right - it's how you did audio and video mixes back in the days of tape: crossfading two replay sources into the record machine, and that's what gave me the idea.

Gosh, @LPowell, that sounds more clunky than using Speedgrade as a stand-alone application (as I do, with Sony Vegas). Since I've started using the Canopus HQX codec, moving files seems to work well between AE / Vegas / Speedgrade. The DPX thing sounds like a bit of a nightmare, not to mention being a resource hog. It's still a pain incorporating Speedgrade into my workflow - my preferred way is to grade the overlapping sections then do mixes in Vegas but it's not ideal. The things I like about Speedgrade are the multiple play heads (for comparing adjacent shots) and the tracking masks.

I've only recently started using AE (5.5) so haven't really explored what's on offer but Color Finesse looks really good - had a play yesterday and it's quite nice to go back to using curves.

When used in the proper setting, SG is quite awesome. But this iteration is just not ready for integration into the full CS. When they have it fully integrated, you'll really begin to love it. Once you get used to using it, you'll begin to see why I began transforming AE into a grading machine with a primitive version of ColorGHear. Because back when it was prohibitively expensive to own a Davinci system or SG; AE was the only real alternative for professional grading at home in 2003.

@matt_gh2 so as to not hijack this thread; part of the explanation is located

here

http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/55779#Comment_55779

and here

http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/55553#Comment_55553

...but mostly Power, Speed, and Flexibility. NLEs should never be used for grading. They are really just there to make your rough cut not look so jarring.

http://www.learningdslrvideo.com/first-day-speedgrade/

Wow ... I've been getting better at this whole NLE/grading thing ... using the CC versions of Adobe's stuff. Still no speed demon, but betting better results and learning how to work the system better.

Took a 'b' roll sequence direct send-to-Sg, about 15 clips. Five adjustment layers between the several sets of clips, working through the whole thing ... next to last clip, putting a static mask in to lighten a face a bit, went to click off the mask to check my work, about the 4th time ... gone.

Everything I'd done was simply GONE. The workspace went from the 4-scopes to the left, monitor to the right layout to a single mid-upper-screen monitor. The "view" was WAY yellow-green, and yet ... all controls showed centered ... as if untouched. Anywhere I scrubbed in the timeline, no matter whether I clicked on a clip or adjustment layer ... all controls zeroed but the monitor image way yellow-green.

Tried a few "undo" Ctrl-Z's, nothing. Clicked the undo icon on the bar ... nothing. I'd seen I don't know how many auto-saves, so ... I closed without saving, re-opened ... well, the funny yellow-green was gone, but the monitor still "solo'd" without scopes ... and the footage was back to original un-varnished anything.

Closed, went back to P-Pro ... no grading showing. Direct send to Speedgrade again ... still no scopes in view, and ... "naked" footage.

I am a little bummed at the moment.

Neil

That's another odd thing ... it's currently set for 15 minute auto-saves, and yes, whilst working I had the little pop-up that another auto-save had occurred. However, after this blip ... when I went to the auto-save folder ... the LAST auto-save showing had been almost two hours earlier, right after first looking at a new folder of "b roll" stuff for this project. After going through the clips from media browser and choosing what I wanted to actually use, I imported clips and still into the project, set another sequence to hold b-roll clips, one for stills, set rough in/out for all the possible b-clips into that sequence, and sent them over to Speedgrade ... for an hour-plus of work there.

None of that was in an auto-save. Around two hours of continuous work, not actually saved. Since Speedgrade was working a P-Pro "proj" file, it supposedly saves back to that file ... just ... weird. All of it.

Neil