ColorGHear TOOLKIT- color grading SYSTEM for AE

shian

@kholi I hesistate to call them "looks". Looks are pretty much singular. You drag and drop them, and you're done. These operate more as nodes. And if you've ever worked in a node based environment you know that each node has a function, but rarely does one node alone create the desired effect. These nodes or GHears are designed to interact with each other in nearly the same way as the nodes on a Davinci or in Color, or Nuke. Some of them are simply looks...maybe a 3rd of them, the rest are nodes that perform a specific function beyond what any single effect in AE can provide. But to be most accurate it is very much like turning AE into SpeedGrade. Not many outside the color world have ever heard of SpeedGrade. Until I was trained on it, i'd never heard of it, but it is layer based - exactly like AE, but with lateral connectivity as well is vertical, which as those who have made it through the first round of tutorials can attest is something I've already begun talking about. I've basically turned AE into SpeedGrade and saved you $34,975.

kholi

@shian

I am sure there will be people that value the information that you're offering. It seems like there was a communication error on my part: I only wanted to see exactly what you were selling. I agree, AE and SG are hyper similar in those regards, we've been finishing broadcast projects in AE for years along-side working in a DaVinci theater for major clientele. It's all pretty common, for myself.

Me, personally, I like to know exactly what I'm buying, so I asked. No harm done/intended!

perty

I can't download anything it says that the link has been closed because it was used too many times. Can you please provide an alternative??

shian

@perty - you can download it from the members download page. It has the price listed there, but the download is free for members so you won't be charged, just click the download button.
http://colorghear.com/install-instructions/

shian

@kholi - no offense taken. There is no anger in my tone. (unfortunately tone doesn't carry on the web, and can be misconstrued as a flame war) I just wanted to be clear that ColorGHear isn't a look suite, it's something rather different. And this kind of discussion is good, others that come to this thread will be able to get some of their questions answered just by reading through the thread.

kazuo

We've all seen the samples that Shian posted on his site. While they are amazing, the fact remains the clips are under his purview, and we have no access to his workflow.

Now I am not accusing Shian of anything, far from it. I am just looking for some objective appraisal from users who have bought the app off his site. Pls, those who have downloaded the app, and gone on to grade yr stuff, appreciate it if you could post yr honest feedback.

Cheers

shian

Yes, please. I can't wait to see what you guys can do with it. Please post examples. I realize it's only been a day, so it may take some time to get up to speed, and the 'GHrain Killer' and 'Working with Scenes' tutorials aren't up yet (working on 'em right now) but there's plenty of "right-out-of-the-box" stuff you guys can do, especially if you've watched the ColorFist tutorial and have started playing with it.

pc_bel

@shian. Problem solved, thanks.

rockroadpix

Here's a weird thing. I have no AE folder in my documents. I opened up adobe folder in apps and found a presets folder there. Does this do the same thing? Pardon my ignorance.

shian

@rockroadpix it's probably because you've never used that function before, AE will create one for you. Use attached PDF to walk you through it. (updated install video coming later today)

rockroadpix

Function? You mean AE? I've used it to a small degree...

shian

@rockroadpix no the custom user preset function

rockroadpix

gotcha! Thanks!

rockroadpix

Really digging the tutorials

artiswar · Screen shot 2012-01-02 at 12.42.09 PM.png

So I'm just barely scratching the surface of what is possible but this is equally as powerful (in my mind and hands) if not more so than many other programs I've used. I initially was grading this short in Color Finesse which was a little clunky for my taste. Moved to DaVinci Resolve which, on my 2009 17" MacBook Pro was fairly sluggish, and then finally settled on Speedgrade. Speedgrade was great but I was disappointed that, to do what I wanted, I would have to lose a generation of quality by exporting from Speedgrade and back to After Effects for final titles, noise reduction, etc. Nothing was used on this clip except for ColorGHears and Neat Video Noise Reduction. Hope to have a comparison video up soon.

shian

@artiswar - Cool man. Can't wait to see it. Have you tried using the shadow lift as your first rather than last layer? You'll add less noise that way.

@rockroadpix - :) Awesome! 1 more coming tonight, another tomorrow, and hopefully once I get the CS4 bug resolved, 4 more by the weekend.

And with the tutorials, if there's anything you feel I didn't explain thoroughly enough, feel free to tell me. I have a thick skin, so you won't hurt my feelings very easily. And know that more info is coming, I'll try to hammer out EVERYTHING you need to start reeeeeeeally rockin' with the Toolkit by Sunday.

The grain targeting and tracking tutorial going up tonight will definitely help, and I will do a separate ingest and render episode so you don't have to sift through the AE intro to find the settings you need to render out amazing looking masters.

shian

For those having trouble finding their "User Presets" folder - use this workaround.

artiswar

@shian - Thanks for the tip! Any other quick nesting tips? anything I should do first rather than last?

Also, the Grain Killer preset is seriously making me regret purchasing Neat Video. Quicker render times, good results. Seriously a great thing you've made.

shian

@artiswar if you are going to "push" anything, raise levels, etc, always do that first, if you are going to try and stretch your image data like I did in the ColorFist tutorial, do that ABSOLUTELY first. Save any 3-way corrections for last or next to last, any spectral enhancement should happen early - like, layer 2 or 3. Once you have your grain killer set and mixed, turn it off while you work on everything else to speed up preview times.

Yeah, I'm really proud of the GHrain Killer, and in the next Tutorial I'll show you just how powerful it really is.

shian

*****ATTENTION***** -- if you are using CS4 or CS3 on Windows, I will have you a bug fix ASAP, likely by the weekend.

itimjim

Thanks Shian. Purchased, and look forward to working through the tutorials. I'm new to grading video, but not to photographic development. At $25, if you can even make my editing life 1% easier, it will be worth it.

Thanks for the hard work and commitment and I hope it is a success for you.

Tim

chauncy

I'm wondering how colorghear affects workflow with high bitrate gh2 files. I'm on win 7x64 with adobe cs 5.5. I have the full mainconcept plugin for premeir. It's all accesible through media encoder. My machine is powerful.

So what's recommended. Should I put the mts file directly in ae or use 5drgb to encode it with dnxhd first? Or should I do everything I want in ae first then render it to ... what? A final mov file encoded by dnxhd? That doesn't seem practical since the size of the then encoded file is bigger than the mts. Or should I, after encoding to a mov file, then encode to a h264 file?

What's a good workflow using colorghear to get a nice balance between size and highest quality?

Loving colorghear btw.

Hallvalla · Screen Shot 2012-01-02 at 1.38.40 PM.png

@shian

Purchased, all loaded up. But I can't access your tutorials (I'm logged-in). I'm sure I'm just missing something simple?

shian

@hallvalla Had one other issue like this, try another browser. Opera for windows is not reading it, but IE is, Chrome and Safari on mac are working...

Hallvalla

@shian

Thanks - works in Safari, was trying with FireFox.

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