@magnus387 looks great - would love to see the actual clip. What settings did you use?

thx - I meant to write what settings for ColorGHear.

@shian - I just began rendering the ungraded, grain reduction only clips. The clip that had Neat Video applied rendered out in 13 minutes for 371 frames, utilizing 30% of my available 4GB of RAM. I started rendering out the Grain Killer clip and it only had gotten a third of the way through, utilizing 50% RAM (closed Premiere), before I had to stop it to work on other work. I'll finish rendering it through tonight after finishing off my current project. Seems like Neat Video as a more intelligent algorithm but also costs four times as much without any color tools. Grain Killer also softens a little detail where Neat Video leaves a lot of detail and even resharpens. I think the comparison of Grain Killer and Neat Video is an apples and oranges comparison. One is simply a very well configured built in tool and one is a super specific, specialized tool.

The color tools are phenomenal. When I upload the clips, you'll see just how powerful the tools are in comparison to Magic Bullet Colorista. I used to use Colorista exclusively but that's long gone now. Hello, ColorGHears.

I've just scratched the surface of the tutorials and I was in awe as to how much noise & blocking there is in the R and B channels of a MTS file from the GH2. Much to my surprise I loaded a MJPEG from my EP-1 and all the channels were equally "good". Is this a consequence of heavier sub-sampling on H.264? If so, why isn't everyone shooting MJPEG?

@apix If converting gives you a flatter image, then yes. The flatter your image, minus baked-in gamma and noise, the better off you'll be when it comes to grading.

@duartix That's probably a question for @driftwood or one of the other compression geniuses, but I'm guessing its because the intra stuff is looking better to the eye, and then card space/spanning issues. I will have to do some tests shooting with both and see which holds up better to grading and produces the best end product.

@Shian Thanks for the info, noise have been a lot of problem on my test shot, maybe its the iso bug, will have to do more test to confirm. Keep up with the great tutorial =) thanks

@shian Is it $50,00 for ColorGHear plus $50,00 for the tutorials?

@Shian I have a question about export, I am using AFX on a PC, since there is no pro res codec on the setting, it default to the animation codec, is this the same quality? thanks

@shian Thanks for the info =)

@molloy1011 I am using 5DtoRGB like Shian suggested, and it works great :)

@shian - looks good! - what wide angle adapter is that?

@driftwood: Thanks for the note. If I have the time tonight I'll have a look at both MJPEG and AVCHD. I'm particularly curious to compare the IQ on P/B frames in order to check where there is really fire behind all the full Intra smoking madness. :) @shian: Wow, that's a major shadow crushing going on there... it's a really eye opener to all the work that's behind a big production and how raw the footage starts. :)

ColorGHear is definitely looking impressive so far. I've long known that AfterEffects has all the right tools for this kind of work, but I didn't know how to use them very well. That's why plugin-based solutions have seemed so attractive up until now. Shian's approach with ColorGHear seems to give you a way of understanding how all of the tools in AfterEffects really work without hiding everything under an interface. And all of the GHears are specifically tuned to give you a good starting point, so it doesn't feel like you're starting from scratch each time you do color correction. I really do like this approach.

I do have some questions regarding my own workflow that hopefully some of you can help answer.

I use Premiere Pro and After Effects CS5.5 on a Windows 7 machine. Most of the work I do is live concert video with multiple cameras.

My first step is to do my edit in Premiere using a multicam sequence. Once I'm happy with the edit, I go through my timeline/sequence and apply an effect (usually Colorista) to each clip and use it to try to get all of the shots looking consistent. Since it's live concert footage, and the lighting conditions are a constant variable, this helps to make everything flow better visually. The scopes in Premiere also help quite a bit during this process. Since brightening up dark footage tends to bring out noise, I also apply Neat Video to clean everything up. When all of this is done, I export the sequence as a Cineform AVI.

I then import the AVI into After Effects and do an overall "look" and any titling that needs to be done before the final render.

Occasionally, I'll want to go back and change things with the edit or make other minor corrections. I've found that this workflow doesn't make that very easy. And since AE doesn't recognize multicam sequences, I haven't been able to use dynamic link as a workaround.

What I'd LIKE to do is incorporate ColorGHear into my workflow in a way that makes AfterEffects a one-stop solution for color correction and noise removal without having to do any of that sort of work in Premiere. The two things that seem to be getting in the way of that are: 1)Multicam and 2)Nearly every clip needs to be adjusted separately for lift/gamma/gain on the initial pass.

Thanks for any ideas!