Personal View site logo
Amazing MBL color grading
  • 40 Replies sorted by
  • @GravitateMediaGroup That's look great! Many thanks for this preset! I'm gonna make some tests with a neutral picture profile!

    Thanks for sharing.

    Best regards.

    PS: I like your work with FilmConvert.

  • @douglashorn It was an honest question, not sure why you would need to question my question

    @montagereflex If you haven't got FC yet, it's worth every penny.

  • @BurnetRhoades - Great retrospective. I knew a bit of that but it's cool to see it all laid out like that. And like you said, Shain's ColorGhear looks similar. I've actually been planning to jump in and check it out, just out of curiosity and to support his work, but so far I haven't had the time to mess around with my current workflow.

    @GravitateMediaGroup - Wheh! Glad I checked. Kumbaya.

  • @thepalalias Thank you for your response. Yes, I tried 8 bit, 32-Bit Video Levels, 32-Bit Full 1.0 and 2.0. And for that test .veg, I'm just using a PNG of my MOV file and using Vegas export JPG option from the Preview Window to compare. I'm doing that to remove all the gamma shift stuff that I've seen from different video players. And I'm using Vegas Pro 12.

    @Rambo Thank you for your response and the links. I've read those in the past and from knowing that Vegas can be really weird about colorspace, I'm guessing that's why I'm here asking for some help on how to compensate for it using my test project. I also tried adding the Computer RGB - Studio RGB levels to the .veg to see if it helps and it still doesn't match what I get in CS6.

    Here are some quick samples of what I want (CS6_ScratchPadStill) and what I'm getting (Vegas_ScratchPadStill). Note that these two projects have the same video effects applied to them.
    And sorry for the slight thread drift.

    CS6-ScratchPadStill.jpg
    1920 x 1080 - 803K
    Vegas-ScratchPadStill-Studio-32BitVideo.jpg
    1920 x 1080 - 486K
  • @SuperSet - There must be some setting in the user prefs that has something dialed down. It's weird, but it's not that weird. Especially considering a grade has been applied.

  • It's definitely not because of the settings and preferences!

    This is a long lasting issue in almost all versions of Sony Vegas which is never fixed. It works properly only if you render out to .WMV, otherwise no "Computer RGB - Studio RGB", no "Levels", no additional filters and plug-ins help.

  • Ok then, Vegas sucks, I guess.

  • @rockroadpix what makes you say that? lol

  • @superset

    what are you trying to accomplish? i'm a little lost

    use 3 way color to add a little warmth in vegas

  • @Superset' Vegas handles PNG and Jpegs colorspace levels differently than video, that's why you should put them on a separate track within Vegas and adjust levels accordingly.

    To fix difference between the 2 stills just enable a studio to computer levels change ( assuming you have nothing else on the master bus) the preview will appear milky blacks and greyish whites, when you render out to mp4 the levels will be correct. One other thing I always do on export is bump up the saturation a few notches, mp4 exports out of Vegas also tend to desaturated slightly.

    Getting the same result out of two different NLEs is probably not going to be perfect, they all have their own quirks.

  • @DouglasHorn yes, the exciting thing about Shian's project is that it's the direct creation of a professional colorist, with similar motivations as Stu's original tools, with a heavy skew towards pragmatic and extremely targeted, results-based functions that do an extremely good job of not abusing the pixels and what they've been through to get to your editing timeline. Though I'm interested in learning DaVinci it's going to be hard to not see AE as a, still flawed, but powerful tool because you aren't locked into any one system or paradigm.

    I was at CalArts with Stu for a while and we stayed in touch over the years. Back then we were both big fans of the Canon A1-Digital (though only the audio was digital) Hi-8mm camcorder and he might have actually started what would become MB working out how to make that footage look better. It had a 15fps "gain up" mode that was popular with folks that just went buck wild when the first DV cameras hit the market. At some point he sent me like an alpha copy of the DV enhancement portion of MB, which was an AE project file he'd use as a basis for each new session, but I never got to use it because, at that time, I hadn't upgraded my copy of AE to their After Effects Professional version.

    By April 2001 (I have to reference an old copy of American Cinematographer Mag. to help my memory) Magic Bullet might have been announced as a product but I don't think it was for sale yet. By this time it and The Orphanage had superseded all other forms of enhancement of video material and prep for filmout as well as established itself as a legitimate facility for high end color correction, utilizing the MB Suite. Good enough for Allen Daviau to partner with them when he shot his first digital short for Sundance.

    It came out as a product somewhere between then and the next fall or winter. My brother and I had shot Xtracurricular in June of 2001 but it took us some additional time to raise the funds to build our editorial (doing "online" HD back then meant a minimum of about $45-50K for the cheapest solutions...just the cables linking our array to the Cinewave editor I built cost upwards of $500-600). Somewhere during the process I re-connected with Stu to talk about the project and he got Red Giant to send me a dongle and copy of the retail version, which we were incredibly thankful for.

  • Much appreciate the input, fellas. Will tinker around with it more.

  • @GravitateMediaGroup - What makes me say it? The fact that I have seen projects opened in two different NLEs and they appeared slightly off from one another - moreso when there was a grade applied. This happened at DuArt and Moving Images. Two very tech savvy locations.

  • @rockroadpix yeah, but that doesn't mean "vegas sucks"

  • which is the best way to soften the image inside vegas? Gaussian blur?