Final Touch HD
Someone out there may have read the chat that Mike of HD For Indies and I had regarding the future of shake, particularly in the context of a desktop DI tool. Well, it seems as if that workflow is mostly unnecessary now. A company called Silicon Colour has released a dedicated colouring system called Final Touch HD for US $5,000.
Mike has given it a bit of a once-over and it sounds MIGHTY impressive. To wit:
The killer is that its a USD$5,000 piece of software relying on the HOST machines processing power. Thats a big saving on the USD$100,000+ Nucoda system. Interestingly, Mike's snaps reveal that the system uses the exact same console interface of the Nucoda.
Wow. Seriously, fucking wow. I said in that early discussion that desktop DI was two years away. I'm seriously considering revising that to 1 year. If the G6s manage to come out (the 3ghz G5 was due SIX MONTHS AGO) then this system will kane it.
Fucking hell, the AFC needs to get its shit together. This is what we need to be putting our money into. We MUST make digital cinema a reality here, because I see no other way for our industry to survive. We simply can't compete dollar-for-dollar with the US, so we must learn to be faster, cheaper, better. Its that philosophy that has spearheaded our DoPs into Hollywood. Andrew Lesnie used to shoot 1000' of 16mm a week for Simon's Wonder World. He had none of the big resources and THATS why he's good.
In other news, I ordered an iPod Shuffle today. I already own an iPod 30gig (G3) but the 1gig iPod shuffle was $200. I was going to buy a 1 gig flash drive for $180, and this just makes so much more sense as a general purpose small device. It'll be good for running and cycling.
Oh, I've also been asked to write a comic for the extremely talented Alex Fry. Shall be very very very fun. Its on spec, of course, but I'm fairly confident will come up with something that can be published.
Mike has given it a bit of a once-over and it sounds MIGHTY impressive. To wit:
It will do realtime color correction of HD footage with multiple color correction effects,
-it will handle 10 bit footage
-all color correction is done in 32 bit per CHANNEL color space (floating point color correction)
-all color correction is done in RGB
-it can work with proxy files for lower throughput drive systems.
-you can have tracked soft matted color corrections with feathered color vignettes, primary and secondary color correction, and gaussian blur...ALL IN REAL TIME.
The killer is that its a USD$5,000 piece of software relying on the HOST machines processing power. Thats a big saving on the USD$100,000+ Nucoda system. Interestingly, Mike's snaps reveal that the system uses the exact same console interface of the Nucoda.
Wow. Seriously, fucking wow. I said in that early discussion that desktop DI was two years away. I'm seriously considering revising that to 1 year. If the G6s manage to come out (the 3ghz G5 was due SIX MONTHS AGO) then this system will kane it.
Fucking hell, the AFC needs to get its shit together. This is what we need to be putting our money into. We MUST make digital cinema a reality here, because I see no other way for our industry to survive. We simply can't compete dollar-for-dollar with the US, so we must learn to be faster, cheaper, better. Its that philosophy that has spearheaded our DoPs into Hollywood. Andrew Lesnie used to shoot 1000' of 16mm a week for Simon's Wonder World. He had none of the big resources and THATS why he's good.
In other news, I ordered an iPod Shuffle today. I already own an iPod 30gig (G3) but the 1gig iPod shuffle was $200. I was going to buy a 1 gig flash drive for $180, and this just makes so much more sense as a general purpose small device. It'll be good for running and cycling.
Oh, I've also been asked to write a comic for the extremely talented Alex Fry. Shall be very very very fun. Its on spec, of course, but I'm fairly confident will come up with something that can be published.
posted by stu willis at
5:53 pm
1 Comments:
Final Touch looks better on paper than it does in practice.
Productivity-wise, the bugs/crashes and XML/EDLs not conforming right do waste your time. Better than Shake I suppose though.
Quality-wise, there are things about FT HD that aren't that great.
No luma/luminance functions, only RGB means that some things like adjusting gamma look messed up in some cases.
The falloff on the vignettes look wrong, which leads to "halos" if you try to push the secondary color correction to make a noticeable difference.
The falloff on the square vignette looks totally wrong in the corners.
I don't think color depth is 32-bit float.
Bugs on a few of the filters... sharpen will sharpen the picture edges, noise reduction sometimes creates crap on the right and bottom picture edges.
Motion tracking does kick ass. Sometimes it doesn't work though. You guessed it, another bug.
Gamma curves (to emulate film gamma) is a pain in the ass without a control surface, and you only have limited control over it.
For basic and mid-level color correction, Nattress' film effects is faster, better-looking and cheaper.
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Anonymous, at Mon Sept 05, 07:05:00 am AEST
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