What's behind the Merging of Video Editing & Color Grading

Bartlomiej over at Creative Impatience posted this excellent article about the convergence of NLE & Color Grading tools. We have programs like Adobe Premiere adding powerful Lumentri Color tools from Speedgrade, Resolve adding video editing features and Avid Symphony with it's robust color tools. Add in plug-ins from Baselight and Red Giant and it's becoming clear that editors are going to need to understand and be able to color grade. Videoguys most popular YouTube video is Steve Hullfish's "How to get the best Color Correction with Avid Media Composer" with over 16K views.

Creative Impatience The Inevitable Convergence III – The NLE/Grading Edition With the introduction of Resolve 12, suddenly the race towards a unified NLE/Grading tool become very interesting. It’s hard to argue, that color correction and color grading became an integral part of post-production workflow. It’s also seemingly one of the low-hanging fruits, as opposed to visual effects and audio. Let’s see what is going on for all major players in this regard.

Adobe

The CC 2015 update of Adobe Creative Cloud made long strides towards the integrated tool. Premiere Pro received (finally!) updated scopes, dedicated colour grading workspace with elaborate primary and partial secondary correction, as well as some streamlining: clip selection following playhead. Master clip effects were already added last year, but they also went a great length towards making a grading experience in Premiere more efficient. True to its motto of democratisation of colour, Adobe decided to make the controls similar to the ones one might encounter in Lightroom, making it easier to lure new users into the world of grading. This means that the tools which video people and seasoned SpeedGrade users were using on a daily basis – three-way color corrector – ended up in a very bottom of the stack, somewhat obscured. While understandable in the short run, this decision might turn out to be a bit mistaken, if an integration with any grading panel is introduced in the future. read more...