LARRY JORDAN
The difference this chip makes is enormous: where it exists, compressing HEVC takes only twice as long as compressing the same file using H.264 – which is also hardware accelerated. However, without hardware acceleration, compression takes 30 to 60 times longer than compressing H.264. Like HDR, HEVC is the future. Currently there are almost no current deliverables that require HEVC, but over this next year we’ll start to see more need for this codec. And, when it comes, your Mac will be ready. release, starting with the option to add, apply and remove camera and custom LUTs. A LUT (look-up table) is a set of numbers that converts binary numbers – which is how pixels are stored on your hard disk – into a colour for display on a monitor. LUTs have always been a part of Final Cut, but previously they couldn’t be accessed. Now, however, they can be. The benefit to using LUTs is that they allow us to convert from the image recorded by the camera sensor into a colour displayed on the monitor instantly and without rendering. Even better, we can change LUTs at any time with no penalty. While FCP X can’t create LUTs – use a program such as 3D LUT Creator to do that – the 3 Colour management Colour is big news in the 10.4
“Colour curves emulate the curve controls in Photoshop”
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TOP LEFT New colour tools with 10.4 include colour wheels, colour
curves and Hue/ Saturation curves.
ABOVE RIGHT Automatic Balance Colour, ideal for anyone unfamiliar with video scopes or colour tools. TOP RIGHT A return to the colour wheels of FCP 4 sees an improved user interface for these features. BELOW The 10.4 release includes the ability to to add, apply and remove camera and custom LUTs.
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software does make it very easy to experiment with different LUTs to see which colours look the best. Generally, LUTs get the look of our media ‘in the ballpark’ and then we use the colour tools in Final Cut Pro X to make our images look their very best. Colour tools 4 One of the biggest changes in 10.4 is the addition of new colour tools: colour wheels, colour curves and Hue/Saturation curves. It’s important to note that Apple didn’t change the underlying colour engine that FCP X uses. Instead it provided much more control over the colours in an image, which can then be manipulated by the colour engine. 5 My favourite new colour tool is a return to the colour wheels we first met in Final Cut Pro 4. Except that these wheels have an improved interface: the triangular slider on the right controls greyscale levels, the triangular slider on the left controls saturation, while the dot in the centre allows us to change hue values. There are also colour curves that emulate the curve controls in Photoshop, along with Hue/ Saturation curves, which resemble similar structures inside DaVinci
Resolve. Each of these tools is worth its own separate investigation. In fact, when I was creating my Final Cut 10.4 video training, it took more than two hours and 12,000 words to describe them fully. 6 Also, and this did not make the ‘official’ list of key new features, Apple has made a small but highly significant change to the automatic Balance Colour command, which is stored in the Enhancements menu at the bottom left of the viewer. We can now colour balance a clip by applying this effect, changing it to ‘White Balance’ in the inspector, then clicking on something in the image that’s supposed to be grey. Colour casts instantly disappear. This tool is ideal for anyone who has no idea how video scopes or the colour tools work, but still wants their video to look better. The earlier version was mostly useless. This new update makes it a very powerful tool for automatically cleaning up an image: find something that is supposed to be a mid-tone grey, then click it with the eye-dropper tool. Amazing! There are so many more changes Apple has made to colour controls: colour corrections can now be keyframed, masks have been improved and multiple colour tools can be applied to the same clip.
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SPRING 2018 PRO MOVIEMAKER
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