First Look: Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5
Pinnacle has raised the ante once again with its Edition nonlinear editing software, and we'll give you a pre-release peek at some of its new features right here on Digital Media Net. The new name for the software is now officially Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5, and it adds improved color correction, new ways to control slow motion, and a few other useful features. Pinnacle says this new version will be shipping later this month (September, 2003). Let's see what additions are in this new edition of Edition -- oops, I mean Liquid Edition 5.5. |
| Click image for enlargement: Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5 color correction dialog box |
If you need to get even more precise, there's a three point color balance feature where you pick a dark spot, a light spot and a gray spot. Then you can modify your shot further, accessing only these ranges of the color space. If looking at it with your own eyes isn't enough, you can always call up a vector scope to see the result of your ministrations on the scope. I only wish with Liquid Edition would let you play a clip while you're analyzing it -- now the best you can do is scrub back and forth on the clip and see your results that way. Even so, this feature feels like it's created for mere mortals to use, and gives you plenty of ways to view what you're doing.
In addition to all those viewing choices, there's one way of evaluating your results that I've never seen before. This involves a combination of a waveform and vectorscope into one 3D image that represents the way these two interact. Briefly, if you're not familiar with these scopes, a vector scope shows you the intensity and hue of the colors in a particular shot, while a waveform monitor depicts the brightness of the video signal. In this 3D view of these parameters, the tallness of the image shows you how bright it is while the width shows you the intensity of the color. You can see it changing as you manipulate the colors. It gives you a unique look at the way color and brightness interact in a video image, allowing you to visualize color correction in an entirely different way.
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Another useful implementation of depicting color comparison in new and highly functional ways is seen in the RGB parade histogram view, where it lets you match a clip to its reference by lining that clip up to the other clip that's superimposed over it. It gives you useful visual feedback while you manipulate the color of the clip with your mouse, allowing you to match two colors precisely.
This new feature makes it much easier to accomplish certain effects with features that used to only be available on $300K compositing systems. For example, say you're working with a shot where a guy has on a green shirt, and there's blue painting on a white wall, and you want to change all these colors to a different hue. With this secondary color correction capability, you can select each color, isolate its range of colors and make changes that affect each one separately. Drag across a color and that will be the range of colors affected. You're also able to accumulate a collection of colors that can be adjusted at once by clicking on a plus sign. This capability can be useful if you're looking to create a "Pleasantville" effect, where your actors are shown in color while all the background appears to be black and white.
I was impressed with the power and ease-of-use of this new color correction section of Liquid Edition. A slight gripe I'd have would be that you can't apply your color corrections automatically to all the other shots in a bin or project. But as a workaround you are able to save a preset containing those color corrections and copy/paste those attributes into all the other clips, or save this effect into an effects library for later use. I understand that creating this powerful capability in the software isn't as easy as it looks, but I'm hoping Pinnacle will include this correct-all-shots-at-once capability in future releases. Another big plus with all these color correction tools -- even though your results can't play back in real time, Edition's background rendering takes care of the rendering so quickly that most of the time I didn't even realize there was any rendering happening.
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