I haven't done a tonne of colour grading yet, but I have found Vegas to be sufficient thus far.


I am starting to look for a third party colour grading program....any suggestions?



Here is a music video that I edited and graded on Vegas 9c.

YouTube - Stringer Lake; Something's Off Today (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0Uq2UFNROg)

Magic Bullet Looks from Red Giant software is very useful for color grading. It has presets for a wide variety of "Looks" as well as a large number of tools that can be used individually to apply specific corrections.

Thanks Jim, I appreciate it. I have only heard about Magic Bullet, but it seems as if a lot of people use it.


For the video I did, Vegas 9 was enough (I graded it to 75% black and white and then bumped up the contrast and did a little with brightness levels in some scenes).

Be advised that Magic Bullet is a real render killer :-(
By that, I mean that you'll see your render times increase dramatically when you use it.
For example, I took a 16 sec. clip, applied the Cool preset to it with Color Curves and Magic Bullet Looks and rendered it to AVI.
The clip with curves rendered in 10 sec. while the MB one took 2 min. 38 sec. for the same "look".
Their site has a list of approved video cards (only a few though) that take advantage of the power of the card to do some of the processing which does help.

...bumped up the contrast and did a little with brightness levels...

You really should learn to use Color Curves.
This will give you a LOT more control than brightness and contrast as they affect the entire scene while curves allows you to target a specific luminance range.

Hi Brent,

I find this video very interesting :
Red Giant Software: Red Giant TV - Video (http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/videos/redgianttv-video.php?id=23)

You should also try the AAV6CC plugin for vegas
AAV ColorLab (http://aav6cc.blogspot.com/)

.vince

newbluefx video essentials can also be used and doen't take the resources of MB.

You really should learn to use Color Curves.
This will give you a LOT more control than brightness and contrast as they affect the entire scene while curves allows you to target a specific luminance range.





I have played around with colour curves a little.... I'm still learning how to use them effectively.

Thanks for all of the input though, I do appreciate it!

Hi Brent,

I find this video very interesting :
Red Giant Software: Red Giant TV - Video (http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/videos/redgianttv-video.php?id=23)

You should also try the AAV6CC plugin for vegas
AAV ColorLab (http://aav6cc.blogspot.com/)

.vince

This. I have had great success with both. If you need free, small and easy, AAV6cc is GREAT! If you need much much more functionality and choice, MBL is quite excellent. MBL has a lot that AAV6CC does not have like gradients, to mention one big one.

MBL has a lot that AAV6CC does not have like gradients, to mention one big one.

I find MBL gradients as well as spot exposure to be invaluable when I edit stage production shoots where the lighting across the stage is very uneven.

I bought MBL last week and I have been so far very impressed with it. I really like the ability to adjust the preset 'looks' to the exact spec that is needed for certain scenes.

One thing I do not like is that it is not compatible with my new computer that I just got...I'm running the 64 bit version of Vegas 9 on it (MBL does not support 64 bit Vegas).

I am getting After Effects and most likely Premiere and MBL works in 64 bit in those programs.


Does anyone have much experience grading in After Effects? Or should the grading be done before I use AE?