Topic: Workflow / importing Colorgrades

Great info! Thanks for the heads-up, AG.
Can you confirm, since these grades are designed to create a certain look over a range of cuts, that the Prim/Sec Inputs are left alone, since they would be for color correcting? In other words, these grades are designed for pictures that have already been corrected to a natural look, right?

Thanks,
EZ

Topic: Tips, Tricks and Tutorials / Tracking

Maybe that’s its intended purpose—although I was surprised how difficult it was to track a (moderately-moving) white dot. I’ve tried it on car shots for commercials, and found it couldn’t track lugnuts, door handles, keyholes, distant lights . . . Had to do everything manually. But well worth it. I hate relying on the secondary color-key function for object-oriented color control, if you know what I mean.
Am curious about other’s experiences with tracking as well.

Topic: Workflow / importing Colorgrades

Keep in mind, they’re grades, not a colorFX item. You can use them in the Primary In/Out rooms.
Very nice grades, by the way.

Topic: Tips, Tricks and Tutorials / Tracking

Just thought I’d start a topic on tracking for Color, since it appears to be rarely discussed elsewhere, and to confirm how difficult it is to use.
I started with a shot of someone sanding down a car, with a lot of head movement as they progress from one side of the frame to the other. Color’s tracker couldn’t stay on any head-geometry for more than a second. Hand-tracking is made difficult by the fact that the label for the tracker often obscures the detail I’m trying to track, unless I zoom in. Not a solution I care for.
So, I thought I would track the clip in Shake, and export a QT of same size and framerate, using the tracking data to move a 10-pixel white dot around in a black frame. My thought was that I could track this in Color (as a clip comped over the original clip) and then copy and paste grade data.
Here’s what I learned.
First, the tracker doesn’t work like other trackers I’ve used (Commotion, After Effects, Shake). If the outside boundary of the tracker makes “impact” with the edge of the video/film frame, it cannot move off frame any further. It may slide up and down or backa and forth, but will not move off screen.
Second, the tracker appears to update its target on a frame-by-frame basis. This helps in some situations, but when tracking white dots should be something that can be turned off. It can’t. So once the tracker is off its original target, it still has no clue. Pretty funny, once you come to grips with how bad this tracker is.
Third, it has an affinity for high-contrast edges, so if the tracker’s inside frame is larger than the dot, the tracker will drift to the edge of the dot, and cling to that for several seconds, before gradually drifting away.
Fourth. To get the tracker to stay with the center of the dot, the tracker’s inside frame must be smaller than the dot, with no black showing. In other words, less than 6 pixels across. This, believe it or not, actually works. My tracking would only fail when the outside box collided with the video’s edges.
Fifth, copying grades from one clip to another does not allow tracking data to go with it. I was able to apply a mask with tracking data to the black video with white dot, but copying that grade to the original clip only brought over the shape—it did not bring the tracking data with it.

So my efforts to find a work-around failed, but I thought what I discovered along the way might give some insight into how the tracker works (or doesn’t), and possibly prevent others from wasting a large amount of time following this particular work-around.