Premier CS5-Color Correction / Grading

[Greg Harris]

Hey guys, what's the best way to grade my video in Premier CS5? I recently came over to the premier family from FCP and I'm use to color.

thanks

[Bart Walczak]

There is an ample number of filters that are supplied with Premiere Pro: Fast Color Corrector, Three-way Color Corrector, Luma Curve, RGB Curves, levels, and a bunch of other stuff.

However, for serious work I would suggest obtaining Magic Bullet Colorista or Looks, because there is no simple way to create vignettes and masks in Premiere.

Or export XML to Color/Resolve.

Or wait for CS6 with Iridas SpeedGrade integrated with the suite :)

[Craig Parkes]

Have you tried just using Color if you are still on a Mac? you can send a final cut XML out of Premiere, and import the final cut XML from Color I believe.

Alternativly check out DaVinci Resolve Light.

If you are on Windows, you are currently limited to plugins (not great ui experience) or After Effects (not great ui and no real time playback timeline)

[Marcus Durham]

I've been a huge fan of Colorista as you can just grade on the timeline. However it might just be me but it doesn't seem that quick in Premiere compared to FCP. Perhaps I'm now just spoiled by how fast all the Mercury effects work in Premiere?

Do check it out though. Although if you get along OK with Color (I personally dislike it) then you can still use it.

[Bruce Watson]

Originally Posted by Greg Harris

... what's the best way to grade my video in Premier CS5? I recently came over to the premier family from FCP and I'm use to color.

No best way -- depends on what you have and what you are trying to do with it. The "normal" way in the Adobe family is to export the footage to AE and grade it there. There are bound to be plugins for grading in PP though.

AE ships with Color Finesse by Synthetic Aperture. An interesting tool that makes a lot of grading tasks fairly easy.