In the beginning with the 7D i was setting the camera colour as neutral as possible so i could create my look in post but found it didn't take to grading that well. After about three shoots i changed my tune. The camera makes beautiful images but there's not much latitude to work with.

Now i get my colour in camera, and the colour grades much much better.

in Vegas i use curves and 3 way corrector most of the time and then use magic bullet or Cineforms First Light to tune in a look; although to clarify, with the use of "looks" most of the image is there in the original camera color PLUS the Sony curves and 3 way corrector, and magic bullet is for slight, but overall changes, making sure to apply the "look" on a shot by shot basis, for the most part any way. And some times i pop into Colorista in AE for more complicated corrections, such as the same scene shot over different days with different weather, lighting etc. Colorista has masks which you can do in Vegas but in Colorista its part of the workflow.

But Sonys or any NLEs curves and 3 ways color correctors are enough for most jobs...we're not grading million dollar productions are we?

The most important thing is having some kind of calibrated monitor...its doesn't have to be a 3000$ FSI or Sony monitor, but just a calibrated broadcast monitor. I have JVC HMC150 SD CRT and a Panasonic TH42PD12 flat panel that's 720P, buts it's enough. Both are very affordable: 400 and about 750 respectively.

Use Lynda.com for all your color correction training. It saved me a ton of money and I prefer watching videos over reading text. In the Final Cut Pro training there is a section for Color Correction which is easy to learn the basics. It will make your footage look 50% better with a few simple clicks. Then watch the training section on Color Correction. You will see then how it is better than Final Cut Pro's 3-Way corrector. Don't bother with Magic Bullet. Your just cheating yourself and wasting your time.

I'm not a fan of Kelby Training series but it is another option for you too.

Start watching the tutorials and you'll be color correcting in now time.

Use Lynda.com for all your color correction training. It saved me a ton of money and I prefer watching videos over reading text. In the Final Cut Pro training there is a section for Color Correction which is easy to learn the basics. It will make your footage look 50% better with a few simple clicks. Then watch the training section on Color Correction. You will see then how it is better than Final Cut Pro's 3-Way corrector.

I'm not a fan of Kelby Training series but it is another option for you too.

Start watching the tutorials and you'll be color correcting in now time.

Instead of looking at Magic Bullet Looks checkout at Colorista II instead. It can do much of what most people do in Color, including Primary, Secondary and Master sections with shapes, masks etc. The nice thing is it all works within FCP and you don't need to collapse sequences, render motion files etc or go outside of FCP. There are no round tripping issues and it's all part of the FCP project instead of having to archive two projects. If you need to come back to a project 6 months later it's all self contained :)

I also like Colorista II and use it within After Effects.

Our workflow is to edit in Vegas with Cineform AVIs, note the files used in the scene, import the original MOVs into AE and perform all noise reduction, color correction, and film grain processes in AE. We then render to individual Cineform AVIs with the same names as the originals. By swapping media folders, the Vegas project is now using the CC'd files, which were created in a single pass.

We could use Premiere for editing, but we own more copies of Vegas and are pretty quick with it. Maybe we'll try using Premiere on our next project...

...and what about cs5?
 

I'm wondering if any of you could comment on the capabilities of (cs5) Premiere's color correctors and how well (or poorly) they compare to Color and/or Colorista.

just make sure that if you decide to color correct you set up the camera to record the most latitude possible. By that I mean turn down the contrast and sharpness and whatever comes right below it in the menu ;)
I'd take the time to be more specific but there's lots of info on it and everybody has their own preference.

I posted a picture of something I CC'd. Usually I don't CC but the footage right out of the camera (top) was horrible. With a few clicks with FCP's 3-way colour corrector, I was able to get an image I was satisfied with (bottom).

Like others have said, check out some tutorial videos. Here's one that helped me. It's old (FCP3!) but uses the same interface and principles as FCP7. DVcreators.network | Blog | How does the FCP Color Corrector work?

So I definitely think it's worth learning the 3-way first. Magic Bullet is kinda the lazy way but it works for some people especially if you can learn to tweak things and not just use presets. But if you learn Color, you can probably achieve any look you want.

I hate hearing this statement. There is nothing "lazy" about using Magic Bullet. It has three different 3-way color corrector tools, and dozens of other tools to allow very effective coloring. It's a gross misrepresentation to think that just because you can open it and use a preset, that it's not powerful, and it's used by lazy people.

I recently did some color work for a friend who was editing a spot for on online TV show. He has MB and so do I so rather than me sending him back finished video files, I simply sent him the looks configuration files for his show. He got a very fast education in how I do color, and was surprised to see that I was building chains of 5-12 effects per clip to get the looks I wanted. A touch if fill here, and subtle vignette there, a light diagonal gradient in the corner, a little tweak to the color of light coming in the window, etc.

There are many tools available to people who wish to do color grading. Properly used MB Looks can be very powerful and quite effective. Colorista 2 as well. But I'd really like to emphasize that just because someone uses MB Looks doesn't make them lazy.

Of course, that's why I added that bit at the end ("works if you tweak things" etc) but perhaps I should have emphasized that more. I'm definitely no colorist so take my words with a grain of salt :p

Perrone and others, if you don't mind a bit of a side topic, can you share if there are differences in the color correcting tools in Magic Bullet vs. [Apple] Color? Or can they pretty much achieve the same thing?

Well first, there is a difference between color *correction* and color grading. Correction is usually concerned with getting the image to look the way it looked to the eye (or intended to look to the eye) when it was shot. Whites are white, blacks are black, color casts are removed, etc.

Color grading is an artistic endeavor that is designed to elicit emotion or feeling from looking at a shot. Looking at a photograph and a water color of the same scene will give a different perspective of that scene...

To that end. tools make primarily for one, may not be all that great at the other. Some tools are really excellent at both. The Red Giant tools for instance like Colorista and MB Looks are a good example. Colorista has some excellent color correction tools. Things that used to be available only in high end tools like Color. But these things have moved down market. MB Looks lacks some of these tools, notably masking.

Tools like DaVinci, Color, Colorista, etc., allow you to use masking tools to work on small portions of a frame at a time. For instance if you want to change the color of light coming in a window in the corner of a shot, you mask off everything but that, change the colors, and set tracking points, and your colors stay locked to that window. MB Looks has no such tool. However, you can fake it with a lot more work by doing things like adding a subtle color gradient on that window and manipulating it's position in the home application.

I am not conversant with Color so I cannot give a good comparison to other tools. I've seen it's screens, and it's highlighted in one of my color correction/grading books, so I have an idea of it's tools, but not enough to give intelligent comparisons.

Many people are familiar with the 3-way color corrector, and while it's an important tool of color correction, it's simply one of dozens of tools a colorist will use to get a look. Curves is far more powerful but need to be used with much more care. Other tools like masking, gradients, diffusion, vignettes, spot and fill colors, color contrasts, etc., are all parts of the toolbox.

Truly learning to use the scopes is a major overlooked portion of using these apps as well. I can do practically everything with the RGB parade and the vectorscope.

I'll be curious to hear the thoughts of others on your question.