Apple's Color Sucks

I know I rag on Apple a lot, but they deserve it.

Color is an application bundled with Final Cut Studio. Apple bought "Final Touch" and renamed it "Color" and much like the un-renamed "Shake" they bought only the name and current code so no one, ever, will update it or improve it.

Seriously. Apple Pro Apps are becoming this miserable wasteland of whogivesafuck. Shake's gone from being the #1 desktop compositing app the world over to bargain bin "I wish we had Nuke" software. While I'll be the first to admit compositing isn't exactly the forefront of technology and since Shake supports floating point bit depth it's pretty much at the top of the game, but come on. Autodesk manages to staple on some unnecessary crap every year to justify the $1200 Maya upgrades.

So Color. A DI suite on your desktop. You've got your digital versions of trackballs for your different hue swings and you can make masks and bad keys to isolate areas, so I'd put it on par with a DaVinci in terms of a feature set, but what the fuck is this? I can't set color ranges, the number input fields are a pain to use and the Shake like schematic is only deep enough to really piss me off and make me want to individually export every damn shot to Shake to color correct.

The whole point of this software is that it works so dang well with Final Cut Pro, which it does in the sense that sending the project over is easy. So far however, It's not radically better than Final Cut's native color correction tools.

Maybe now I know why it's free.

Mostly Color sucks cos it's close to being really dang nice. A few more features, an actual product cycle instead of wating for yet another NAB for Apple to not show up at and not announce anything for cos they're too busy getting people to code tip calculators for their phone.