@stonebat at $30 QT Pro is a steal, and a must have in my opinion. I don't know that I have time to do side by side comparisons of all the different ways of exporting from AE vs it's QT Pro equivalent. I'm busy putting together the film school shoots. I want to get those off the ground before the end of the month when I could get crazy busy again. And the CGFS will undoubtedly unleash the creativity of everyone who watches and learns, and I promised to give you the tools you need to start telling your stories with greater production value...I intend to deliver.

1.0 is totally flat. Those are my exact settings. The tutorial I did before was on a earlier version. I now use the full paid version, which has the same interface. And it rules!

Did make an interesting find. 422 HQ transcodes are flatter than 444, but 444 has better detail and sharpness.

Also notice that at the bottom it tells you the bitrate of your clip as well. So if you don't have any of the streamparser type apps, you can at least see what the actual bitrate is of your clips. This was how I decided to stop using EOSHD's patches. They may work for him, but they don't hold up for me. They performed abysmally in my tests, and once I peeked at the data rate I knew why. They claimed to be 88Mbit and 44Mbit patches but only yielded a max of 40 and 19 Mbit streams respectively, and with fog/smoke they dropped to 25 and 11Mbits which created a TON of artifacting. I now only use Quantum 9b. While it doesn't span on my cards, it does give me consistant 149Mbit/s streams (146 with fog) that are a dream to grade!

Prolly 444 would help render output faster, too.

Here's a new music video I just did for my band -- While it may not be the best grading job ever, I never would have gotten it looking this good without ColorGHear and the tutorials -- thanks @shian (and of course VK & Driftwood).

@shian More or less. Some power windows with levels and exposure, too, to get the sky shots closer. Thanks again.

FYI the Mac App Store has the latest 5DtoRGB free/batch versions.

@shian thanks for the help. I must upgrade to Lion anyway. The latest QT X (v10.2) has Vimeo/Youtube sharing option and can trim ProRes MP4 file from 5DtoRGB without any loss. If that doesn't suffice my need, I'd get the QT 7 Pro.

@tonalt just for color correction. All sound and editing should be completed in your NLE. The only exception might be if you want to do flash or bloom cuts. I do those in AE, but I use FCP to determine the cut point, do a straight cut, and then fabricate the bloom in AFX. I also export all my sound mixing into a separate WAV or AIF file and either marry it in AE or in QT Pro.

In Vegas, you can save the project using the "Save As" function, and save it as an AVID AAF file, and then import that AAF into AE. It should work the same way as exporting an XML from FCP, in that all your footage and edits will be brought into AE, and then the CGT tutorials will tell you how to work with your timeline.

I'd test this workflow first between Vegas and AE before purchasing, just to be sure.

PS I tested AAF import in CS5, and you'll need to install Automatic Duck for AE for it to work. It's free. Links to it are on the ColorGHear website.

@cls105

Well.. now it's more like a series of helpful presets for AE. Not a UI plugin or anything like that. It needs more developers, coders to do that as @shian said.. so maybe in the future. But I think far future from now. Still, the NLE-AfterFX workflow is not bad at all at this point.

Someone posted the first link here last month. I prefer 4:4:4 over 4k. Huge IQ improvement on the same 1080p TV.

@shian have you tried AE CS5's Unsharp Mask on GH2 footages? Any plan for ColorGHear Sharpening?

I set the film mode sharpness at -2 and used Unsharp Mask in AE CS5. It gave nasty halos.

Here's an interesting article. The second example talks about sharpening only Luma channel. http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/cmg_keyframes/story/luma_processing/

"To avoid these halos, Photoshop power users convert the image into LAB color space (akin to YUV), and sharpen just the “L” - luma - channel. These trick is easy to simulate in After Effects: Follow Unsharp Mask with the Channel > CC Composite effect, and set its Composite Original popup to Color. This says to use the color information of the original image, and the luma information of the effected image."

Ok, one request: Your tool is awesome and in this topic it's possible to find great examples from you @Shian and others like @Stonebat, showing comparisons of original and processed files. But that is exactly what I am missing on your website.

Although there are videos (the same as those from your first post here), there is no comparison showing original and processed footage in a side by side view.

So just as an suggestion (and I think others "complained" about that also before): Show some before and after pictures/video on your Frontpage (or a special sub-page). Why? Well, if I was looking into your software, that was what I wanted to see on your website. But there isn't any of those comparisons available. So where should a random visitor know from what your software really is capable of, if the original footage can't be checked to compare or if there is no half/half picture/video showing before/after? Without that, I most likely would leave the website again without buying the software.

Besides that: Great work - makes me envy all the After Effects users...

The first video on your website or in this thread?