That video is cool, but it wouldn't have sold me on First Light. What would have would be a video showing off how just how quick and easy color correction and achieving film looks is. What is especially amazing is how it doesn't seem to slow render times. If you add a little bit of a film look with Magic Bullet, you extend your render times exponentially. If you do the same thing with First Light, it just whips through the render like you hadn't even added correction, even on a dual core laptop! Now THAT is cool.

I also like that you can set a clip to loop and correct away as it repeats. Then you can copy and past those corrections on other clips and use that as a starting point for further fine tuning. After you're done, it is already there in Vegas ready to be rendered.

You can have several different versions of color correction. You can switch back and forth between them in First Light. Then whichever one is active, Vegas already is using it. That is just too cool for words.

Then there is the whole thing of being able to transfer your color corrections between editing platforms.

Up until I tried it, I just didn't see the point. Now I've just had it a day and I can't imagine doing it any other way.

Do you want to do demo video for FirstLight? Sounds like you day usage has hit on many of it key advantages.

David

My ears perked up. I've got to check this out. Looks like Magic Bullet/Mojo etc are not heading over to Vegas 64 bit.

I'm assuming FirstLight works in all version of Vegas? I'm using Neoscene for all my 7D stuff and had not followed NEO to closely. This looks like a great way to work - Thanks for the heads up.

Unless you've tried it, you have no idea of how cool it actually is. Here's the basic workflow:

(As you read the following remember that your clips have to be encoded with Cineform for this all to work)

You have your project open in Vegas. You open up all the clips you want to color correct in First Light. You pick a typical clip. You set the clip to loop and start color correcting. If you have a high end monitor card First Light will drive that. The thing that is so amazing is that First Light will control everything that reads that Cineform encoded avi. It can be Vegas, it can be WMP, it can be After Effects, it can be Virtual Dub or VLC. It doesn't matter. All your color corrections show up in everything that plays back that avi. There is no rendering. It is all GPU accelerated. You can adjust the color while it is playing full screen at full hd resolution in media player without so much as a glitch. Once you color correct a clip, you can control-C copy the adjustments, select a bunch of similar clips, and hit control-V. All the selected clips are now adjusted and immediately play back with the corrections in every program. There are a bunch of film looks (which I'm not wild about but expect will improve). You can save any corrections as presets. There is a data base for the corrections. You can save a single file with all the corrections for a given project. You can switch back and forth between completely different sets of adjustments for all the clips in a given project at once. All this and I see no difference whatsoever on the preview or rendering times with my Core2Duo laptop. You can transfer color correct between editing platforms. I could color correct an FCP project even though I have no experience with FCP. To say this is cool is a complete and utter understatement.

Do you want to do demo video for FirstLight? Sounds like you day usage has hit on many of it key advantages.

I would love to. I'll PM you.

Checked out the Vimeo demo - The collaboration focus with drop box sounds cool but I would love to see some kind of demo showing the color correction power of FirstLight.

Download the demo of Cineform Neo HD and you'll be able to try it out for free for two weeks. It is part of the package. It kind of sells itself once you try it.

This does sound very interesting. Could I use it on my standard definition DV footage if it was re-encoded to Cineform?

"It kind of sells itself once you try it."

That's what I'm afraid of :)

>Could I use it on my standard definition DV footage if it was re-encoded to Cineform?

Yeah you could do that. Color correction on SD stuff is already pretty quick though. Nick, are you still using that HVR-A1? Is your SD material stuff that was downconverted in camera to SD? The reason I'm asking is that DV codec SD has a lower colorspace. If you shot HD and captured with Cineform without using the camera downrez but instead using the rescale to SD size in Cineform you'd end up with SD resolution clips in AVI format with Cineform compression. These SD resolution clips would handle pretty much like your SD DV codec footage except that they would retain the HDV colorspace. This would give you more vibrant color that would last all the way up to your DVD mpeg2 render. You could also use First Light on your SD footage if you did it this way.

I've never tried this however. David, will Cineform rescale interlaced HD footage into properly interlaced SD resolution? To do this it would have to separate the two fields, resize them separately, then fold them back together by even and odd lines. I'm asking because when you downrez in the camera on capture it does this properly and I wouldn't recommend using the HD Link resize on interlaced footage unless it did this as well.

HDLink will scale to SD, even with interlace footage. Are people still using interlaced, and SD, stop that. :)

Are people still using interlaced, and SD, stop that. :)

Sorry David but school budgets being what they are, I'll be shooting interlaced SD for the foreseeable future :-(

Mike

Clearly I'm slow today, but I'm having trouble opening my NEOHD clips in FirstLight. Seems easy when I read the instructions, but I fail completely. Obviously there is a necessary link that I've overlooked; NLE Sync isn't doing for me, either. If I try copy paste of clips the FL stops working. Windows 7 64.

No Laurence, I'm referring to 4:3 PAL DV footage that was shot with a VX2000. I'm currently colour correcting a few thousand clips of that format (destructively in Vegas) and keeping a "corrected" copy alongside the original. This First Light workflow definitely appeals, although the stock footage house I'm preparing them for is Mac based and wants me to avoid Cineform if I can possibly help it (despite me pointing them to the Neo Player for Mac).

It's irrelevant now but I'm a little confused by what you're saying about colorspace. Were you referring to the 4:1:1 of NTSC DV being "lower" than the 4:2:0 of HDV? PAL DV is 4:2:0, the same as HDV.

By the way, I never had an A1. My HDV is 1080-50i and 1080-60i shot with a Z1P.

PAL colorspace is great. It's the NTSC DV codec colorspace that is inferior. I would keep PAL SD in DV codec format and just color correct with something else. Have you tried http://aav6cc.blogspot.com/AAV ColorLab[/link]? It is GPU accelerated and my favorite Vegas plugin color corrector.

I hadn't heard about that Laurence. Thanks for the tip. I just installed it on Vegas 8.0c and it works OK. I think I'll probably still use the inbuilt Vegas tools for most of my work but this could be very useful, especially in my case lowering saturation of specific colours in the 6-vector effect.

The one thing that isn't immediately obvious in AAV is that not only are there check boxes, but you can also click on each of the words to the left of the check boxes to bring up additional adjustments. A lot of people miss that at first.

What I'm doing with First Light now is to do my color correction to sRGB levels. On Vegas I have the AAV filter on the master video bus set to expand levels from 16-235 out to 0-235. Sort of a "blacks of cRGB and whites of sRGB" preset. I enable this preset when I want to check the color in the preview or when I render a computer viewable version. I disable it to render DVD or Bluray versions. I find that on Youtube and Vimeo the 0-235 range looks best to my eyes. The blacks look dark but the whites aren't blown out like they can be with true cRGB levels.

On First Light I really like the histogram. It is a histogram with four colored layers: white, red, green and blue. You can set the white balance really easily by sliding the white balance slider until the three primary colors are all on top of each other, and with the white level it is easy to set your top and bottom ranges. You have to remember to turn the histogram off before you render because it shows up on any application that plays back the clips.

Color correcting in First Light feels a lot more like adjusting colors in Photoshop than in a video editor. I like it better than the three color wheels.

Laurence,
Is there a trick to opening clips in FL?
Serena

Serena,
I've playing with the trial too. I think the clips need to be in the Cineform codec.

I don't think it can open a regular AVI file. You should probably use HDLink to transcode(convert) the video into the Cineform codec and then try to open in FL.

Tom

Thanks Tom. I'm now playing on my laptop (Vista) and have managed to drag some cineform clips to the clip folder. 1stLight gets very upset if I do copy/paste and definitely do have drag clips using explorer. So now maybe the link to Vegas will reveal itself. I might even be able to do some adjustments, which at the moment do nothing however much I wave the sliders. Perhaps get out the instructions.

EDIT: my problem seems to be that "play" doesn't actuate the clip. The clip is showing in the window. I can move the slider to scan through the clip but the "play.pause" button does nothing. Since the FL instructions appear indicate that activating "play" is necessary, what am I doing wrong?

You're supposed to be able to drag the clips over to First Light. That didn't work for me though. I just use the import function and it seems to work fine. I have no problem opening clips that were already converted in Neo Scene or earlier.

Serena. There is no need to move the clips over to Vegas as the clips that are adjusted in First Light are automatically adjusted in any program that plays them back already. That is the beauty of it. It can be Vegas, it can be media player, it can be Virtualdub or VLC. Firstlight adjusts how the video codec plays back that particular clip. That is why it is so fast. Keep messing with it until you get it. It really is worth it once you figure it out.

Solution: FL has to be run under admin priv. Bit of a bug, I'd say.

In fact several bugs. Without admin priv I can drag files but not import them, whereas with priv I can import but not drag. In both cases C/P bombs it. And options available vary between the two states.