The new ColorFinalePro 2.0 plug-in for FinalCutPro X is out ! After more than a year of work, talks and brain storming with a team of very motivated, skilled and specialized engineers it has been unleashed – its a beast.
New Philosophy
Originally ColorFinale was meant to bring the traditional color controls to FinalCutPro, that where chopped with the introduction of the X version. Since then it has grown to a new level, from the ground-up rewritten.
With the complete rewrite, a lot of changes to the MacOS X environment could be implemented, new hardware acceleration was put under hood, invisible to the users.
Finally the most important aspect for the users – a different philosophy was devised. Where the old ColorFinale lived mainly in its well known floating panel, where most of the tools where housed. Today this has changed slightly, new features to speed up productivity have been added, while the traditional tools have been honed, polished and dramatically improved.
The inspector panel has been vastly extended. Starting with color management, where the user can quickly select color space, transforms for input and output, camera LUTs, avoiding the convoluted anti FinalCut settings. Dedicated controls for exposure, contrast / pivot and color temperature controls front the panel give quick access to the the most common adjustments to get you started on an edit, before diving into color grading.
The new primary controls follow a tried and tested color management pipeline, where one conforms the image first and focuses much later on creative decisions, which saves a tremendous amount of time !
Yet, the new controls are so mature and fine grained that 75% of common adjustments can now be done directly from the inspector with very precise control.
Advantages
ColorFinalePro 2.0 has further improved the overall project workflow with different global synchronization groups for presets and adjustments, advanced copy paste features that are in-line with the native FinalCutPro X options, where the user can now copy paste selective adjustments.
While the native color grading features in FinalCutPro X have matured in the last years, details like synch groups make work on any size project much more efficient and homogenous. While one can adjust one clip after another, going forth and back, a big time drain until an overall look is achieved.
With the usage of groups, for each camera or location this options saves much time !
Much more adjustments
The new adjustment panel is a huge improvement, while it still contains and works pretty much like the old version, it brings much awaited features to ColorFinalePro 2.0.
Before I jump into the mask tracking, lets visit the more mundane features – the layers browser.
If one has hoped to find a node based editor in the new version, the layers browser brings equal power to the color game. You will have to experiment a little bit with the new options, like groups, that out of the box seem trivial, but add a blend mode to it and everything changes !
Each element can now have its own blend mode, including groups of adjustments, along with opacity controls. There are is very long list of different blend modes that leave nothing out.
Select multiple adjustments and click the group icon and you get all selected items grouped with one click. Allowing for a great deal of organization, like in the above picture example, but not limited to this. You can drag elements around, rearrange the order as per your taste, forming complex color correction stacks.
Tracking
ColorFinalePro 2.0 has now its own tracking engine. The square mask icon enables the tracker, while providing a tool set on screen, from where masks can be drawn in many different shapes and forms. You can now add pretty much as many masks as you required, intersect them, subtract, invert, feather and opacity controls for each element individually.
The tracker will try and resolve the movement automatically if possible, starting from the current playhead position forwards or backwards. Should the automatic tracker not recognize the shape in enough detail, you can always make manual adjustment on a per frame basis until it fits !
Should you require to invert a selected mask, a tick mark ‘inverted’ solves that problem.
Image Analys
One of my favorite features !
False Color, turns a false color display mode on, like the ones found on field monitors or in camera exposure controls. A feature that has many hidden talents.
Commonly used to judge exposure, it can be very helpful when adjusting chroma keys for green or blue screen. In this cases a uniform color and bigness of the blue screen is vital for the keyer to work properly. Paired with tracking masks this can become a real life saver.
Isolate – giving you an on-screen adjustable selection of your image, which is very useful to analyze color and luma on the scopes. You can use this side by side with the FinalCutPro X Comparison Viewer. If you enable scopes in both viewports, the comparison frame and the live frame, you can make now very accurate adjustments without guessing. Choose a adjustable shape like square or oval, or a horizontal scan line that isolates online one horizontal line at a time, very useful when analyzing skies for example. 
Color Charts
Color test charts have become more frequent this days, with the introduction of the video checker passports from XRite. The algorithms behind the color chart tool have been vastly improved.
Film Grain and Sharpening
As per Dmitry the lead engineer, FinalCutPro X performance decreases with each instance of a plugin added, where the application has to branch off during processing. Adding a film grain emulator takes one less finishing step out of the equation since it is now built-in to ColorFinalePro 2.0, giving the user a very well rounded set of tools that comes out of one mold.
The new built-in sharpening tool is a algorithmic sharpener, that analyzes the image and sharpens areas selectively, making it much more precise as common sharpeners that apply the effect on the entire image, while the new tool avoids artefacts.
Project Management
In todays world, we often share and collaborate on projects with others, a situation that was problematic in the past. Often times, localized LUTs got left out from sharing. In the new ColorFinalPro 2.0 version a management options is implemented, from where all the used LUTs are listed and can be shared to avoid this problem.
Many times an editor might not have the need for ColorFinalePro on it his or her machine, while working with a colorist remotely. The new version allows now for a free read-only version of ColorFinalePro 2.0 to be installed on machines, which still processes all adjustments stored, but has no local user controls. This opens up a whole realm of workflows !
Finale Words
I will have to dive into all the specific areas in separate posts, as there are so many new and exciting features hidden away, like the ability to share an entire grade as a LUT, or search your entire computer for available LUTs, simplifying the management of such tremendously.
SaKiE 