The filters I use most with MB Looks are unbloom and white diffusion. Are there comparable presets in First Light? I'd like to avoid the performance hit on preview and render with MB.

There is a histogram in First Light. If you check it you can see it in Vegas in the bottom left hand corner of the preview. Turn it off for render though or it will be there in your render. The First Light histogram is quite nice and lets you see exactly what's going on. I wouldn't mind if there was an option to make it bigger though. I find myself squinting through my progressive bifocals in order to see it.

The LUTs(look up tables) that are provided in the sample of "looks" are mostly different film looks (ie how various film stocks would have seen the subject). There are also colour treatment looks, such as bleach bypass, day4night, sepia, etc. I haven't got into it enough to know what else can be done (or, rather, how to do it), but have a look at the cineform site. The set which is provided in FirstLight is very restricted and it could be the set of 34 LUTs is available only to those who own Neo. But download the trial and you'll find out.

"So how do you create your own 3D LUTs? Currently the best way is to use Iridas' Speedgrade On Set. You can download a fully-functional 30-day Trial here: http://www.speedgrade.com/onset/. "


The histogram is excellent. I'm used to working with the waveform monitor which has a good visual relationship with the image, so prefer that.

Next version of Neo (v5 out soon) has Waveform and Vectrascopes controls as well as histogram.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm

P.S. all burnin controls/tools will sizable, and a placeable in X,Y and yes Z space for 3D work.

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Very nice David. It's refreshing how quickly this product is being updated.

We average release is every 3-6 weeks. We are too small to set on cool feature for 12-18 months like the bigs guy do.

just lookin through prospect HD and it seems it too has these metadata functionalities....

Yes, all tools above NeoScene has metadata controls and FirstLight.

What are "metadata controls"?

HOORAY! I can finally dump Magic Bullet Looks! I like MBL and all, but it doesn't work in 64bit, and frankly, I like using ALL my system memory. I have credit card in hand and am about to buy First Light! Woot! (okay, so it's birthday money, but still - I can use it for work if I want to).

I meant to "do not" re-edited below.

Just so you know, you do not get the diffusion controls like in MBL. I still use MBL for overall grading on important projects.

Anatavism, I'm sure you know this but, in case there is confusion, you get FirstLight free. You just have to buy NeoHD or other variant higher than NeoScene.

"all tools above NeoScene has metadata controls and FirstLight."

Re: What are "metadata controls"?

FirstLight is actually a fancy databasing tool, all the color corections are database entries telling the decoder what to do. We call this Active Metadata, this is what a meant by "metadata controls"

I just wanted to mention here that because the color correction in First Light is done before it hits Vegas, it is done at greater precision than Vegas's 8 bit color correction will allow. For instance, if you have 10 bit color, First light will color correct that 10 bit color at full 10 bit precision, then Vegas will truncate it down to 8 bits as it runs it through the VFW pipeline.

More common than that is where you have something shot in an 8 bit color format like HDV. Transferred to Cineform with HD Link, you'll have 8 bit color with two extra empty bits added to the end. First Light will color correct this to 10 bit precision before Vegas and VFW chops off those two extra bits. Yes that will still give you 8 bit color, but you should get more acurate subtle differences in shading with this extra precision.

This is kind of like what you would get if you enable the 32 bit color modes in Vegas, except that the render doesn't take orders of magnitude longer and constantly crash.

Here's a thought (which could be wrong). If you render the Cineform file as I-Frames only (It used to be called "smart rendering"), color correct with First Light and then render the final, edited product in Vegas, also as Cineform, anything that gets "smart rendered" will preserve the FL metadata color corrections in the final output.

Things will get more interesting when FL adds key framing as an option.

I was wondering about that originally too, but no, the First LIght corrections are only for a clip at a time and don't get smart-rendered in the way you are thinking into a larger render. All First Light video is non-smart-rendered after being corrected. Cineform codec video will smart-render only if it is in the I-frame format and no color corrections are being applied.

It is somewhere in between the two last responses. Smart rendering DOES work with the FL corrections, and those correction will hold. However, the resulting files now has multiple GUID (global unique IDs) so it will not be further correctable in FirstLight. So we do not recommend smart render for this reason.

I love when I'm wrong and the answer is cooler than what I thought.

OK, so you can smart-render a file with color correction read instructions in it. Does First Light have to be open? Does a certain preset need to be called up from First Light? I'm obviously missing something here.

Can't help but to download a trial version of FirstLight.

What I like:
1) the concept of metadata control;
2) silky smooth performance;
3) it is a fun way to do color correction.

Why I don't buy it yet:
1) Although fun, it still can't match the power and flexibility of what are currently in Vegas, such as color curves and color corrector which allow one to target high, mid, and low independently;
2) The viewing window (is this the right term?) is too small;
3) Need to buy Neo HD in order to get it.

That's my impression. But I played with it for less than an hour, so I could be missing something.

Lift (dark tones), Gain (highlights), Gamma (mid-tones) are the terms used in FL. It won't take too much more for FL to have keyframes, color curves and various video scopes like RGB Parade. Then it should be on par with other color correction software.

The non-destructive nature of the color correction via metadata, is not novel with regard to digital still images, but the Cineform video implementation is truly impressive.

is this good with DSLR avi from Neoscene?