If you haven’t read the excellent “The DV Rebel’s guide” by Stu Maschwitz do yourself a favor: open a new tab in your browser, go to Amazon and order it now. And pay for the express shipping because you don’t want to spend a single day without knowing what’s in that book. If you have read Rodriguez’s “Rebel without a crew” and liked it, the Rebel’s guide is the modern, digital-based, version of it. It’s one of the most important books for the aspiring independent moviemaker and a great resource for anybody who wants to gain control over the production process. Stu, who co-founded The Orphanage and co-wrote the famous Magic Bullet plugin, gives a complete map, from the choice of camera to the final “onlining” (mastering) steps of your project. And don’t let the “DV” part confuse you, the same techniques apply verbatim to HD as well.One of the revelations presented in The Guide is that After Effects provides you with everything you need for professional color correction. In fact Stu goes as far as claiming that with it you can have the power of a DaVinci color correction system, a workstation that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and that rents at $1,000/hour, including the colorist 
.How is that possible, you might ask. After Effects has 16 and 32 bit processing. This means that you can achieve the kind of precision in processing color information that makes your digital footage look more like film. The only advantage that a DaVinci has to AE is that it process in real time. In AE you have to render but that is hardly a problem for people like us working independently, often at home. With a little bit of skill an knowledge of AE you can use proxies, precomps and other settings to minimize the time necessary to judge a color correction and then let the system go during a break or overnight to render your composition.The great thing is that After Effects does so much more than color correction. In fact it’s your digital special effects house that you can carry with you inside your laptop. Chromakey, masking, background creation, titling, tracking, etc. It’s all there and with plugins like Trapcode Particular you can create stunning scenes.For this reason I was not incredibly excited about Apple’s Color. A lot has been said and tried since its release at NAB 2007. Color is nice but it’s yet another application that has its own UI (User Interface), that is unfamiliar to people who know Final Cut, and that requires all kind of rendering back and forth. Given that I already have that power in After Effects, with an application that allows me to do so much more, the only issue that I had was to solve how to move back and forth the NLE and the Compositing program. That’s how I started looking at Premiere. Adobe’s Dynamick Link in fact works much better than the “Send to…” command in FCP and allows you to link After Effects to both Premiere and Encore. The amazing part is that once you Dynamic Link your apps you don’t need to render or even save your After Effects project in order to see the changes in Premiere or Encore. So my 2 cents of advice, if you are on Final Cut 5.x is to save your money and consider Adobe Production Premium or Creative Suite Master Series. These tools, coupled with the accessible wizardry of Stu’s book give you much more control over your creations. Speaking of The Guide, be sure to checkout Stu’s blog, Prolost where you can find all kind of deep knowledge about digital image processing.References:After Effects tutorials: Video Copilot, Motion Works
