Gaijin Cinema: Color Grade in Premiere Pro

Screen grab from The Girl Who Fell To Earth, shot with my 5dm2 @ nuetral, Nikkor 85mm f1.8 @ f4, color graded in Premiere CS6. Tired of trying to make the round tripping between Premiere Pro CS6 to Davinci Resolve work. XML exports don't work with transitions, scaling and time remapping. The alternative of rendering all of your whole raw clips in ReSolve just to preview color grades in Premiere is very time consuming(same problem in Speedgrade) or baking the the footage effects you did in Premiere before jumping to ReSolve defeats the raw file workflow. Hard drive space becomes a premium in QT or R3D. A heavy duty workflow like that would make more sense if I had a bigger stronger computer and not working solo, for now I'm gonna stick it out in Premiere. This is a more streamlined workflow to minimize large rendering time. It's a little more technical and as not as slick color grading in Premiere but saves time in the end. If I need to mask any color effects I'll round trip to After Effects at least I know that is seamless for the most part and pre-render is not required. One sad note is that color grading surface controls don't work inside Premiere. Round tripping between Premiere and RedCineX works great. In RedCineX surface controls like Tangent Wave makes it move quickly and I like the better color UIs like vectorscopes and rgb parades than the ones in the R3D raw metadata UI inside Premiere. I hear good things about Colorista plugin for Premiere and it has a masking tool but I want to invest in learning the tools set that's already at my disposal.

I like to grade my footage with more tonal range rather than crunching the blacks and punchy highlights, so keep that in mind.