@shian doesn't it play okay with Resolve? That in my mind negates the need to include advanced color grading in the editor. But they do need to haul arse and update Logic so FCX can roundtrip to that. I'd rather have three or four separate programs that are really good at doing their part than one big program that does everything but is a beast to navigate. In fact, that is the thing (besides price) that has kept me away from Adobe. Sure, AE is great, but the UI for it is terrifying. With FCX and Resolve, everything is easy to understand because they visualize it.

@shian I haven't kept up with what Apple is doing with FCP but "X" seems so different from the previous software, based on just not being able to avoid chatter about it. Did they acquire a completely different editor and re-brand it under the FCP banner, like they did the original FCP? Or just one of those things where, internally, they start over from scratch and introduce new problems while attempting to fix old ones?

@shian followed your advice and practiced on a pic of a toy monster (Destroyah from the Godzilla series). I basically took a color LUT(Fuji3513) and applied it to a adjustment layer and clicked Overlay and HOLY SHIT! It turned out great! I then spiced it up a little by adding a glow to the horn and Adding Tone Monster RED and Spectral Enhancer to it.

Sorry for the short answers. I'm on my iPad laid up in bed with the flu. Can't think straight

@Mike_C Pro users know to consolidate your LUTs

@B3GUY all that stuff is in the pro tutorials.

Looking good, @shian

I hope you delve into some of the other tabs (tabs? not sure if that is the correct term) besides the main curves. While I agree that the luminance curve is often what is most influential overall when grading, some of the other bits can be extremely useful too. I'm addicted to hue/hue especially, because it lets you push one color towards another color (especially useful for removing greenness from footage by pushing green more yellow). There is so much you can do. I can hardly wait for my 30" to get here so I can start using and picking apart some of your ghears, and making my own, of course! Am I remembering correctly that you have a way that users can share ghears?

Edit: quick question, are you at any point in your workflow going higher quality than 422HQ?

Think of the LUTs as you would the GHears in CGT - they work exactly the same.

It depends on the look you want. In the Film Stock Tutorial, you can see that doing it in a different spot in the chain produces different results. Tech pass on first set of nodes, and look on top of that. But again, watch that FS tutorial to see how different things will look depending on where you put them in the chain.

Secondaries and power windows should always be first - see tutorial #3 for examples.

In honor of my mentor, John Lowry, a free tutorial coming this week on how curves work.

It was truly an honor to work with John Lowry, and a privilege to be one of the lucky few responsible for restoring and preserving film history. It was so nice to see the Academy remember him, and honor him at last night's event.

I still remember a day about 3 months after I began working there, when I was still considered "the rookie". That morning I walked into work, and John was sipping coffee in the foyer. He smiled and said, "Try not to freak out when you get to your workstation." Everyone smiled at me as I walked to my desk. I sat down and logged in, and pulled up my assigned segment, and up popped the damaged film scans of the entire iconic opening gun barrel sequence to "From Russia With Love". I looked up to see John standing there smiling. He winked and said, "It's all yours, kid. We're counting on you." I was floored, not only to be working on a piece of history but to have earned the trust a great man.

@shian, you've convinced me. I've just upgraded to CG Pro. Hoping to be able to use all the power of "Pro" in AE CS6 :-)

@shian Hi mate, Have you done a grade tips for matching GH2 with GH3 yet? (Save me looking ;-) )

To clear something up about CG Pro, as I've been getting quite a few questions about it. Until I have videos really demonstrating it beyond the one below, I'm encouraging people who aren't sure to wait. Unless you are a PP or FCP7 user, and you want layer based grading available to you on those platforms. Or unless you are a SpeedGrade or DaVinci Resolve User, and would like ColorGHear available to you there. If you are primarily an AE user, and curious about upgrading to CG Pro then read the following statement.

Pro is basically the same as CGT; only it is LUT based, and not Preset based, so it can be used in platforms beyond AE. (Except for things native to AE like film grain, Ghrain Killer, gradients, and the expression based Ghears I have for AE like ColorFist and the 3-way CC, there's no way to include those things inside a LUT.) Which is why, for instance to be able to add grain in CG Pro I have created the grain overlays. [FYI I haven't used a 3-way color corrector for anything other than demo purposes in years. They destroy your footage - see below video for details]

Also, because it is LUT based it allows me to do things like the Film Stock Ghears, which as you saw from the CG Toolkit film stock tutorial that the process to create film stocks in CGT was rather complicated for just the simple stocks I had in it. These new stocks are infinitely more complex in the sense that in some cases I was re-mapping the curves per every 10IRE of exposure, per channel, manually, and then collapsing that, and adding the next 10 IRE, and so on - building a very sophisticated custom curve for each stock that reacts to different colors and intensities of light the way a film stock would.

Right now this is the only video out there that demonstrates anything related to CG Pro. If it doesn't answer your questions about CG Pro, please wait until I can produce something that will. I'm working hard to do so, but I'm buried in work for clients, but that cloud should clear by the 2nd week of March. Pro is only out there right now for the people who know my track record, that I deliver a great product, who know they want to use it right now.

@Vitaliy_Kiselev tru dat. but then again.... nobody really pleases me. LOL