Issues with the Color application

After color timing a feature film, three commercials, a web series, and a short film on Final Cut Color, I am finally ready to list my complaints about the application. I do consider it an amazing value (it has some features that are typically only available in expensive hardware based systems), however, it hasn't really reached it's full potential due to several flaws that could be easily ironed out.


1. Secondaries are pre-clipped

This is the single most difficult thing about the application. In a professional color grading application, if I make a primary grade that results in blacks or whites being clipped at 0 or 100 IRE, respectively, and then I make a secondary grade that affects the clipped area, I still have access to the information that was clipped. The clipping is not "burnt in" (i.e. the information is not thrown away) until the shot actually leaves the application. Not so in FCP Color. If I make my primary grade and clip anything, It comes in pre-clipped to the secondaries tab. This makes doing basic tasks like using a power window to take down a hot area impossible. No other professional color grading application behaves like this.


2. No support for speed changes or speed ramping

If I grade something in Lustre or Scratch that has source footage with speed ramping done in post (as opposed to in-camera), the timeline needs to be prepped beforehand... either the shot needs to be pre-rendered with the speed change, or the shot needs to be included as an extra shot at the end of the timeline without a speed change, so that it can be brought back into the original editing application or another application later to have the speed ramp applied.

With FCP Color, it's essentially the same. If I have a shot in FCP that has a speed ramp, I can still send it to Color and round trip it back, but when it shows up back in the FCP timeline, the in/out points and speed ramp need to be manually re-entered. Apparently it's not information that can be encapsulated in the XML that FCP uses to communicate to Color. I would expect this much from an application that's supposed to be standalone, but Color is part of a suite of applications, and I would think that Apple could figure out a way to make them communicate better with each other.


3. The render queue is clumsy

If I grade and render out an entire project, and then go in and make spot changes based off notes, the only way to make sure the clips I modify are all re-rendered is to manually add them to the render queue. The app doesn't keep a list of what needs to be rendered. This could be as easy as adding an "Add un-rendered to render queue" button, but it's not there. In FCP, all I need to do is Apple+R to render anything that's un-rendered, but in Color that functionality just doesn't exist. To complicate matters, there is also no shift-select ability to easily add a group of clips to the queue. One has to command-click all of them.


4. The timeline is clumsy

There is no basic scrolling to navigate the timeline. You can scroll the portion of the timeline that is visible to you (you can't zoom out all the way), or you can go immediately to the beginning or the end of the project, or you can even manually enter a timecode, but you can't just scroll or scrub through it in the same way you can in any other color grading application, or any NLE.