To access the old thread - go here: http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/1817/colorghear-toolkit-color-grading-system-for-ae/p1

So as not to be misleading, ColorGHear is a system, and not so much a plug-in... a school of thought supported through the ColorGHear Toolkit -which is a set of MODULAR PRESETS for After Effects and ColorGHear Pro - which is a set of MODULAR LUTs for Davinci Resolve, FCP7, Premiere Pro, and Adobe Speedgrade, and is not what you'd consider a classical style plug-in.

The toolkit isn't a collection of drag and drop "looks" like Magic Bullet. It is a series of nodes which contain a set of grading instructions or "macros" (a set of operations), specially designed to work with each other to speed up your workflow. Along with these nodes, comes a system of grading which replaces having to perform the minutia of individual corrections by hand. Learned through the online tutorials, this system will give you speedy and precise grades. It is this precision that prevents you from "bending" your images like with standard methods which is what allows me to get such drastic and dramatic grades from normally flimsy DSLR codecs.

As a professional colorist, I noticed that because of the way the color channels in RGB video are tied together; that typical methods like the Color Balance tool, and the 3-way Color Corrector will actually bend an RGB image out of shape. So in order to maximize the full potential of any given image, I had to learn a method of grading that would avoid damaging the footage. I called this method "precision grading."

I also noticed that in executing these precision grades, I was performing the same operations over and over. I began taking notes on what these operations were, and trying to determine if it were possible to create a set of interacting preset nodes that would save me time in having to repeatedly perform these operations.

I soon discovered 37 distinct sets of operations that would serve to correctly grade any, and all footage. 6 of these macros cancel each other out, and only 1 of those 6 could be effectively used at any given time leaving me with 32 nodes - giving me 1,024 possible combinations. Over a thousand distinct grades. Over time, I added some other tools to the set which now sits at 74 nodes all of which are designed to be used in conjunction with the other nodes. (69, if you subtract the 5 canceling nodes) which brings the total to 4,761 distinct grades.

The precision method I mention above is demonstrated here. Along with how the 3-way Color Corrector damages your footage.

The power of ColorGHear is presented in the video demonstrations below.

ColorGHear is available at http://www.ColorGHear.com

(ColorGHear Pro not yet available to the public)

Enjoy!

http://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2013/09/adobe-premiere-pro-cc-october-2013-release.html

There is a ton going on with this update, but this paragraph is what has me smiling.

"Color is becoming increasingly important throughout an entire production workflow, and the addition of the Lumetri Deep Color Engine in the June 2013 Premiere Pro CC release gave editors the ability to work with beautiful SpeedGrade grades right inside the application. With this release, SpeedGrade has fully implemented the Mercury Playback Engine from Premiere Pro, and a brand new workflow between the two applications is being introduced, namely Direct Link. With Direct Link, editors can save a project in Premiere Pro and then open the sequence they were working on directly in SpeedGrade, with no need to deal with interchange formats or any kind of conversion. SpeedGrade then opens the sequence in a familiar timeline that more closely matches how you work in Premiere Pro. You can access all the clip edit points, transitions, and layers, using the same track layout as Premiere Pro. From there, create your grades, and then reopen the same project in Premiere Pro with all your color work fully intact. This workflow uses no interchange formats and no importing or exporting – it’s just the same Premiere Pro project moving between the two applications."

A quick demo of the capabilities apparently. I guess this whole CC thing has some merit update wise.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-at-ibc-2013/adobe-premiere-pro-cc-speedgrade-cc-direct-link

my first payed job as title suggests, still learnoing lots so go easy but constructive criticism is very welcome to help improve ! shot on gh2 with various legacy glass in less than ideal lighting situations, edited with adobe premier pro and after effects cs6 thanks @shian for colorghear (my grading still needs alot of work but its a fantastic tool! ) and @Driftwood for moon patch and @Ralph_B for sanity 5 which some of this was filmed on too because i was caught with only a 16gb card on me at a point! :) thanks guys

Comments welcomed.

this our first episode of a Web Series we produced last year. its my first work as cinematographer and I learned a lot from this site.

shot on GH2 (Non Hacked & Hacked )

Lenses: Canon FD & Lumix

Software used: FCP7, Premier pro CS6, and AE CS6,ColorGHear

please feel free to comment so we can improve and share if you like it.

Special Thanks to Vitaliy & Shian.

This is a very short short. I'm not a plus member on Vimeo, so you'll have to click through and watch it over there at Vimeo in HD.

I've made this on my first visit to one of the 22 islands in the archipelago here - the Red Island. I wanted to see what kind of footage can I come up with while going somewhere for the first time, on foot, with no extra gear, just handheld camera.

Lumix GH2 with Lumix 14-140mm + ColorGHear.

Honest criticism is welcome, better yet mandatory :)

The short story: 31-OCT, the day the Portuguese Budget for 2013 was approved. People gathered in front of the Parliament to say we're being governed by thieves. Not very original I know, but it's a great place to shoot video and take pictures (well at last until it degenerates into mayhem which is rare around this parts but not unheard of until very recently). This is how I worked it.

1) The extremely simple setup:

GH2, screen folded back as a monitor, Transcend 32GB class 10, Samyang 7.5mm fisheye (my favorite video lens), set and forget to hyperfocal, ISO 400 I believe, SS=1/25s. Flowmotion 2 was used as I never know before hand how much video I'm going to capture or how many photos I'll be shooting, so I need something that is very good quality but doesn't make me have to change cards when something very important is happening. If the card is pre-formatted (the extended, not the quick format) it has never failed me to span.

2) The capture:

This is all about getting there up front and trying not to shake the camera. The police until very recently (and only after a 1h stone shower) has been instructed not to charge, so it's an easy job, you just dodge the TV reporters and other amateurs like me. So, here's my first mistake: the aperture is fine, this lens is sharp as an axe, but should have upped the ISO and set a faster SS because in these situations you are always bound to get bumped and it shows in wobbles after software stabilization.

3) Defishing the Samyang:

Load the MTS into AE. Export as image sequence. Use a batch (http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/69869#Comment_69869) to defish the images and import the output again to AE now as image sequence. The defishing was done using the Panini projection. It's loads more natural on people than Rectilinear, it preserves a lot more corner resolution and still manages to keep a few lines straight. This was the first export and not reasonably quick because the synthesis part takes it's toll: ~2-3fps.

4) Stabilizing:

Throw AE's Warp Stabilizer on the footage. Set the "Smoothness" to 15-25% (it will require much less cropping later) set borders to "Stabilize, Synthesize Edges" (again a lot less cropping) but drop the "Synthesis Input Range" to 0,2s otherwise you'll bog AE. In this kind of footage there is usually little point in using a higher value. Skim the footage looking for black borders and try to resize and reframe it so that they don't become evident. Note: defishing after stabilizing should make more sense as you would have more image to work with (defishing crops it) but from a few rough tries, the AE stabilization isn't clearly as effective when working on fisheye footage. This was the second export and a very long one: below 1fps.

5) CC & Denoising:

Used some of ColorGHear's gears, notably GHrain killer to kill a bit of noise and blockiness, but the footage was already very clean from the start and little color correction was used, just a little bit of levels adjusment. This was the third export and I believe it was even longer than the third due to the noise reduction filters: below 0.5fps.

6) The "so long" part: video effects, tracking and subtitling:

Translations were pretty quick, the hard and long part (at least until I found out how to smooth it) was tracking. It was fastidious to track people's features, takes a long time and needs constant review and adjustment. In the end I found out a few tricks (like increasing the tracking area) and smoothing the tracking points. This eased the job a lot and gave much better results. In the end I had to do it sometimes up to 3x until I was satisfied with it. In the process I had to learn a lot about tracking, smoothing, 3D objects, texting, transitions and light sources. This was the forth, the quickest and last export, probably around 10fps.

7) Audio mixing.

This was the part I was more ignorant about, but turned out to be pretty simple. Even though it's pretty rough, the footage is little demanding with so much crowd noise. It was as simple as importing the last video export from AE into Premiere, importing the original sound, importing also "Le Tigre - Dike March 2001" cutting and pasting a few pieces of this track and adjusting the volume here and there to serve the original events while leaving the words of the protesters audible when needed and off I was to the final export.

The resulting video can be found here:

Here are a few pictures of the event.

Anything more you may want to know about any part of the process I'll be glad to detail it.