Apple’s Final Cut Pro is the darling of social media content creators. Nevertheless, plenty of editors working in traditional TV and film post also love its appeal. While Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve is of interest to many, the truth is that Final Cut Pro is up to snuff for many of the same tasks with a far easier workflow.
In order to be a legitimate challenge to Resolve, Final Cut Pro needs a great color correction toolkit and that’s where Color Finale fits in. The built-in FCP color tools are good, but Color Finale takes it to the next level (read my 2020 review linked here). Today, Color Finale still remains exclusive to FCP and has been going through continuous updates since it was originally introduced.
If you are going to use an application for high-end post, it also has to be able to deal with a range of media types generated by different cameras. Often that’s in a camera raw format. Blackmagic Design’s cameras have become increasingly popular. With that, we’ve seen the emergence of their BRAW camera raw media format. Although Apple and Blackmagic Design have a friendly working relationship, one area where they don’t see eye-to-eye is in natively supporting each other’s raw format. If you shoot with a Blackmagic camera in BRAW, then Final Cut Pro does not natively support it. But fear not, because Color Finale was first to market with Transcoder to solve the issue (read my 2021 review linked here). Not a company to sit back, Color Trix, Ltd (the developers behind Color Finale) has just released Color Finale Transcoder 2.0.
Color Finale 2.8
Color Finale is constantly being updated and is currently on version 2.8. It uses eight layer tools to create looks: telecine (color wheels), curves, color vectors, HSL curves, “shuffle” (channel mixer), filters (blurs), camera matrix adjustments, and log wheels. You can apply instances of any tool more than once, rearrange the order of the layer stack, group them into folders, use blend modes, apply inside and outside masking, and finally, use LUTs and presets. In short, there’s little that Color Finale misses.
The 2.5 update added the log wheels and camera matrix layer. Log wheels are designed to make color adjustments to log footage before applying a LUT to correct it to REC 709 video. The camera matrix controls allow you to alter the balance of the RGB channels from the camera. For example, you might wish to change the hue or saturation of just the red channel of the signal. In other new features, filters, like Gaussian blurs, can now be selectively adjusted by individual RGB channels. Masking and blending modes are also active in the filters panel. You can apply s-curve adjustments in the curves control. Finally, you can preserve brightness or saturation levels when making adjustments in the channel mixer (shuffle layer).
Color Final Transcoder 2.0
Initially Color Final Transcoder supported BRAW, ARRIRAW, DNG, and CinemaDNG camera raw formats. If you own a Blackmagic Design camera, you could certainly use DaVinci Resolve to edit or simply transcode all of your media. But that’s not appealing to many users, which is why Color Finale introduced Transcoder.
Fast-forward a few years and there are now additional raw formats to contend with, including from Nikon. Color Finale Transcoder 2.0 introduces a new first – support of Nikon’s N-RAW format. In fact, the developers wrote the entire color pipeline in-house to support N-RAW. In addition, Transcoder 2.0 can now also deal with raw image stills.
As before, you can use Transcoder 2.0 within Final Cut Pro as a workflow extension or as a standalone application. Clips can be brought directly into Final Cut Pro for playback as either original or transcoded media.
I’ve run some tests with Nikon Z8 footage and performance is good and the image from the camera looks great. Nikon originally manufactured one of the first digital SLR cameras to shoot video, but they haven’t gotten much love until recently. The Z8 and Z9 cameras make great-looking images and by using Transcoder 2.0 you can work directly with that footage inside of Final Cut Pro.
There are several ways to work with Transcoder 2.0. The easiest is to select the files in the Transcoder app’s own media browser, make color and level adjustments, and then send those to a Final Cut Pro library as original media. Alternatively, you can follow this same process, but opt to transcode the files into one of several flavors of ProRes. Finally, you can choose to use Transcoder 2.0 as a standalone transcoding application to save the new files to a separate location independent of using it with Final Cut Pro. This is ideal if you edit with another application and would like to have the fluid performance that ProRes provides.
The Color Finale 2.8 and Color Finale Transcoder 2.0 updates both help to maintain Apple Final Cut Pro as an attractive high-end post-production solution.
©2024 Oliver Peters
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