jeff@dungeonbeach.com

Yes, this is a cool idea. I had a somewhat similar idea, but not with luma ranges, but rather saturation ranges... Rather than see a histogram in the bottom right, you'd see a vectorscope. And you could set concentric rings as your low, high, and some kind of falloff / softknee. It would specify whether the fixed vectors are affecting areas of high, middle, or low saturation. For instance, imagine you are correcting a shot of Little Red Riding Hood. Let's say you want to affect the hue of her hood. Currently, if you swing the red slider, you'd change the hue of both her skin and costume. But if you could define the saturation range the fixed vectors affected, you could potential change her face while leaving the hood the same, or vice-versa. As Cristobal said, you can use the Qualifier for this. But it would be quite fun to have in the fixed vectors, and would be a nice bit of visual consistency amongst the different color tools. It'd also be nice to just have a little vectorscope there which shows your corrections, similar to how primaries and bands work now. Potentially this would be a way to get the fixed vectors to work in ACES, as well. You could limit the gamut that's being affected. And you could have dropdown presets for this, etc. In any case...obviously no huge urgency for something like this...just fun to think about.

Ah, using Workflows to convert the DPX to PNG and email it is a very fun idea. I'll try it.

+1 for all these feature requests

Alt+up/down for next/prev mode is a good idea; I'm going to try it!

I've been grading a beautifully shot short film in Mistika 10 this week and have had a great experience so far. Definitely the best feature has been the mini curve / histogram in the bottom right which visualizes your corrections (does this thing have a name???). It's been very helpful for "look development," because you can see how you are affecting the curve. Visualizing the RGB separation helps make creative choices. The only thing about the new interface that is really sticking out as noticeably irksome is the placement of the "FX presets" button. Currently the FX presets button is in the top right of the visual editor, at the top of the new tool band (strip?). But actually the thumbnails of the FX presets appear all the way on the bottom left. So there's a lot of reaching all the way from one corner of the screen to the other to reveal / use the FX presets, then hide them again. I'm working on an ultrawide display so it's an especially long round trip. Maybe it would be better to have the button that reveals / hides the FX presets in the middle / bottom left? Speaking of FX presets -- I know the whole interface will be refreshed eventually, but that's one area that stands out as fairly cluttered and in need of cleanup. Like I'm not sure we need to see a filepath in the visual editor or "new folder" buttons, etc. As colorists, it would just be nice to see a clean window with as many thumbnails as possible. In terms of saving presets in specific folders, exporting, etc., that could all be handled with right-click contextual menu, or by navigating using Windows Explorer. I think while grading, we just want to quickly capture and recall stills within the current environment. A dream request would be the ability to drag thumbnails directly form the visual editor into a Gmail compose window -- we colorists are needing to send stills to clients constantly. Not just during Covid. It would definitely save quite a bit of time to not have to save a preset, switch to Windows, navigate to the SGO Data folder, project, etc., open the DPX in photoshop, convert to jpeg, find it, attach it to gmail...

I had a chance to spend a day grading with the new mapping on the Wave2. I do think it's nice to be able to see the printer lights displayed in the LEDs, and to be able to access the full range of printer lights (RGBCMY) in the same bank and without needing to press ALT. One thing that jumped out to me is I wonder if the "up" and "down" arrows should be reversed. Currently, the "up" arrow (above function keys) toggles the button banks. And the "down" arrow toggles the knobs. But actually it's the knobs that are on top (on the panel) and the buttons on bottom. So possibly the up arrow should toggle the knobs and the down arrow should toggle the buttons. That would help new users understand what is being toggled just by looking at the panel. Overall the idea of using banks within Mistika's individual tools (the primary having multiple sub-banks, the bands having sub-banks), is pretty clever, and adds a lot of functionality to the relatively small Wave. One area where I got tripped up was trying to navigate from printer lights to bands. Because printer lights is now on a sub-bank of primaries, when you are using the printer lights, you don't see the bank navigation anymore. So it's two button presses to get to bands. First you have to press the up (or was it down?) arrow to get to the home bank, then you can go to bands. I can't think of a solution off the top of my head, but this struck me as a trade-off for having added the extra functionality. Just curious...there's no "Offset Cyan, Offset Magenta, Offset Yellow, Cont Cyan, Cont Magenta, Cont Yellow," right? Part of me wonders if it's just cleaner to put the "printer lights" on dials for the cramped Wave2...

I was actually saying we *don't* need 1 point. You don't need to add it, I think.

I haven't tried this mapping yet but I wanted to say I do think it's OK to lose the "1 point" option for printer lights. I'm grading a short now and I find that "1 point" is way too big an increment for anything other than a totally imbalanced shot. 1/4 is good for most cases, using 1/2 for "big" changes.

Stumbled across this old thread just now. I had also been wishing there was a way to limit the "scope" of split conform, ideally by limiting what gets split to what's selected (so your audio mix doesn't receive a million cuts, for example, when you just wanted to cut an ACED ODT effect node). The grouping trick is great trick to keep in mind. I've definitely learned that each clip really wants its own effect nodes, and any kind of overarching adjustment layer really messes up clip-to-clip navigation in the visual editor. That said, I'm not sure why this couldn't be otherwise. Let's say you have three clips, each with their own color grade node. Then a common grain node on top spanning all three clips. If you are in the visual editor, evaluating through the top grain (blue marker in eval tree) but modifying the color node (green marker), if you press next/prev clip, it would be nice if you would then jump to the next clip's color node, so long as its on the same track in the Timespace (while "locking" the evaluation height, as OP suggests). This could be a situation where having multiple monitors makes this kind of navigation easier / more transparent. But I've definitely wished I could use "one big adjustment layer" quite a few times while maintaining expected clip navigation in the visual editor. Such as when experimenting with grain, ODT configurations, or developing a 'digital stock' creative layer...wanting to keep massaging that look without constantly needing to propagate).

I fixed the issue of getting "stuck" in the alternate mode when engaging "ALT-lock." In Mapper, you need to also give the ALT button the mapping of "Select ALTernative function." when in Alternate world. Now you can "escape" Alt lock by single pressing alt.

Thank you for the reply. My laptop happens to be 3840x2160, so I guess I'm in luck. I still wonder a bit about aspect ratio. I know Mistika was initially developed for 16:10 screens. Is this still the case going forward? Or is development now assuming most people will have 16:9 monitors? I understand both aspect ratios are/will be supported, but I also know that screen real estate is at a premium with the new color tools, so just wondering what's optimal... I'm liking M10 - I posted some impressions on Liftgammagain. I have some questions / feature requests: (1) Is it possible to not have "License Expires in X Days" message appear every time Mistika is launched and we arrive in a blank time space? I don't know if this is a bug or intended behavior. It's easy enough to dismiss the message, but I am always startled by receiving an error noise when I launch. I am on monthly subscription. (2) Speaking of launching into empty timespace...is there a way to load the last .env file you were in by default when Mistika starts? So we don't have to open it manually each time to resume our work? (3) I noticed in the media browser, when you click on a file that is a movie, you see a preview in the source monitor in the GUI. Which is nice when you are searching for the right file to open. But it would be much nicer if the movie opened on the video card output so we can preview on the big screen. (4) Is there a keyboard shortcut to temporarily mute the entire color node, not just the vector you are on? I like to periodically disable the entire grade to see where I'm at. (5) Is there a keyboard shortcut to enter the visual editor with a particular node selected on the timespace? I know you typically enter the visual editor by double clicking a node. But with a stylus, double clicking is not an optimal gesture and you can even bump the node by mistake when you just want to enter the visual editor. I thought hitting enter might do the trick, but it doesn't. (6) Can I suggest drastically reducing the time it takes for tool tips to appear when you hover over an icon? I feel like when I want a tool tip, I'm waiting a long time. And some tool tips don't seem implemented yet, so I don't know if I should keep waiting or not. Especially now that we have nice icons on the top left and top right, which are unlabeled, I think new users will need to hover over them and see a quick tool tip to identify. (7) I understand that Unicolor is probably going to be improved at some point, but in the short term, is it possible to rearrange the color space dropdown in alphabetical order? Right now, whenever I try Unicolor, I'm losing a lot of time hunting for Arri, ACEScct, etc., because the color spaces are arranged arbitrarily. Eventually it would be nice if Unicolor could read the clip node metadata and make a suggestion for input color space. Also, it would be nice, in the short term, if picking color space would automatically suggest gamma. Like you pick Rec709, it should automatically suggest 2.4. If you pick ACES, it would automatically suggest Linear, etc.. (8) It would be good to have a consistent "reset" operation on the new color tool that you can do with a pen. I noticed you can right-click and choose "delete" for the sat slider. Would be good to just double click the sat knob to reset, since many operators are used to that from Resolve/Adobe. In Assimilate we control click parameters to reset them. It could be something else. I don't love pressing delete to reset parameters because it involves putting down the stylus and reaching for the keyboard. (9) Just observing that it takes a while for an external drive to show up in the media browser if you plug it in with the media browser open. Even though Windows recognizes the drive and gives it a letter, Mistika takes quite a bit of refreshing and exiting / reentering the browser for the drive to appear. (10) Play/pause lag is still significant compared to other applications, even with pipe units reduced, and having tried Mistika on many different machines. Stopping is particularly jarring, because there's always a little twitch when you hit stop. Mistika won't stop playing on the exact frame you hit stop, it jumps a few frames and it's kind of disorienting, and can even land you outside of the shot you tried to stop on. Just want to flag this issue for the team and make sure they are aware and seeing this issue. Thank you for the incredible work! Jeff

Finally had a chance to try the revamped mapping (with printer lights) as well as Tangent's Mapper Beta with "alt-lock." Printer lights work great. But alt-lock not so great. I can double-tap Alt to enter alternate mode, but then I'm stuck there. I was hoping single pressing Alt would "quit" alt mode but it doesn't. And double-tapping alt doesn't escape either. Anyone else seeing this issue? I'm also experiencing an issue where I am in the primaries mode, press bands on the tangent, and the interface switches to bands but the Tangent snaps back to primaries. So I'm looking at bands in Mistika, moving the balls, and nothing is happening. When I look down to the Wave2, I see I somehow have reverted to Primaries there.

Are there recommended GUI scale factors for common monitor resolutions? At my studio I have a 1920x1200 monitor so the Mistika UI looks great, but I'm on the road now and find myself with a 3840x2160 4K laptop attached to a 3440x1440 ultra wide screen secondary display. Just trying to find a comfortable scaling factor for either display. Also, how shall we give Beta feedback? This thread? A separate thread on this forum? A Slack channel?

Awesome. I'm gonna give it a shot when the M10 Beta arrives. Will this mapping ship with that Beta or should we download and install the mapping separately?

Good news! I had written to Andy at Tangent asking if they could implement "Alt-lock," and I just received a reply from him that they did! Here's what he said: Many apologies that it has taken me so long to respond to your enquiry. I wanted to find out what it would take to add this function before I replied, which involved some investigation work. However I’m pleased to say that we have now baked this feature into a Beta release. If you’d like to give it a try then we have the Windows version ready to download here If you need the Mac version then please let me know and we can build that for you after the Easter weekend. To enable the Alt-lock function for your user, run the Mapper and then File > User Preferences > Enable ALTernate Function Lock A double tap of the Alt button will then latch the Alt function and a single tap will then release it.

Thank you for thinking of these solutions. I see that neither is too ideal. Hmmm. I personally don't control the Curves with a panel but I do know some users are passionate about being able to do that, so best not to alienate them. Do you have any relationship with the manufacturers of Tangent? Can you possible poke them about adding "Caps-lock" style functionality to the Tangent Mapper software, as an option? Let them know it's important to your customers? I imagine since SGO is selling the Elements as the panel of choice for Ultima (6 panels, no less!), maybe Tangent can help us out here. Because the mapping is pretty good otherwise. I actually wrote to Andy Knox at Tangent requesting alt = caps lock, but he didn't reply (I wrote about one month ago). For now maybe I will keep a paperweight near my station and put it on the alt button when I need to lock it. FWIW, I know in Assimilate Scratch you can get the Alt button to work as "lock" by double clicking it! It's very handy. But Scratch doesn't use the Tangent Mapper to control the Wave2. It uses its internal software interface, which I think maybe pre-dates the Mapper?

I completely understand. Please don't worry about changing the default mapping to accommodate having "pre-sat" and "post-sat" on the same Wave2 page. I was just thinking out loud that those are two functions I like to juggle for creative purposes, sometimes with one hand on each knob. Dialing down "pre-sat" lets you subdue the original colors in a scene (skin tones, different production design colors), while Post-sat lets you boost the strength of whatever colors you have added. So it's a way to control the overall strength of the color grade vs. what was captured on set. Speaking of workflow, I do think it's a little more logical to first deal with "pre-sat" on the primaries and "post-sat" as a secondary (in bands), but that's just how I work as a colorist. I understand you need to have "Post-sat" on the Primaries page for CDL compliance, so we're kind of stuck the way it is. It's fine.

Maybe what's needed is a ColorGradeACES FX which is totally separate from the regular Color Grade node and has the bands scaled correctly + built-in shader/CTL code to fix all the bonkers blue and magenta highlight pixelation that can occur...

I hope everyone at SGO is staying safe. We are in disbelief reading in the news about the lockdown in Spain. I'm actually grading my first commercial project in Mistika Boutique, and because of the corona virus, my client has asked to do the final review remotely instead of in person at my studio. More than understandable. Does Boutique have remote grading functionality? I was reading about the live stream functionality (leveraging the NVidia GPU encoder with something like YouTube Live), but actually it's only available in Mistika Ultima, right? And there would probably be some delay anyway--too much for a proper grading session with client feedback. I think since my session is on Tuesday I may just use zoom (regular screen sharing that is not high quality). Of course it is not ideal because the client will see the entire interface, and I will have to keep toggling to full screen (what's the shortcut again for that???). No rush to reply. Stay safe. Jeff

Hi Cristobal, thank you for the updated mapping. I tried it. I like it better. To me it makes more sense to use the function keys as printer lights because of their unique 3x3 button layout. And because, when I do put down my stylus and use both hands on the Wave2, I like to use as much of the panel as possible for tactile grading functionality. Possibly it would be nice if the F-keys could stay as printer lights even when in "Bands," but I'm not sure; I'm gonna try the current setup for a bit. Are there keyboard shortcuts for the presets (and histories)? Another idea, maybe strange... If the F keys are printer lights, then you kinda don't need "dials" for Level R, Level G, Level B." That's already accomplished by the printer lights. So potentially those three knobs are up for grabs in the Primaries bank. It would actually be awesome if they were the Saturation, All Contrast, and All Hue from the bands page, but adjusting them didn't switch the GUI to bands... Let me explain. When doing a primary grade, it is nice to juggle "input saturation" vs. "post saturation." Right now we have to jump between bands and primaries to juggle these very different controls. Would be amazing to have them next to each other. Likewise with contrast -- contrast in Primaries is linear, which is awesome, but sometimes you want S-curvey contrast so you don't blow your highlights and crush your blacks. This would also make it so you don't have to hit "alt" when in bands to get to "pre-sat." That's actually one of the pain points for me using the alt button on the panel as a modifier and not a toggle. I guess I feel like it's too many steps to get to "Sat-All" - first hit bands, then hit alt, then adjust. I'll experiment if I get a chance. Jeff

What's the correct stack order? Does the shaderFX go before or after the Unicolor? Before the ODT? Before the Unicolor? After the ODT?

Ah, OK, thank you for clarifying. I was grading last night in Mistika and finally opened the Tangent Mapper and saw that, indeed, F1-F9 are for presets. I was thinking of changing them to printer lights, though. Maybe top row is RGB, second is CMY. And holding alt is (minus) those same lights. Is it possibly to get the alt button to behave more like caps lock? Tangent limitation? It's actually not so ergonomic to press and hold the alt key and press another button on the panel. Especially when holding a stylus, it becomes a big operation. I really wish alt was a toggle. Also, is it possible to make the play button stay in the loop of a particular shot in the visual editor? One thing that bugs me is when I'm working on a particular shot, I grade it, was to see how it plays, and the playhead goes to the next shot on the timeline even though I intend to loop the shot I've been working on.

I also like the Wave2 mapping. It's very simple. But lots of buttons are unused, no? F1-F9. Up and down arrows for banks. Seems like there's opportunity to improve.

I loved this masterclass. Very dense yet clear. I appreciated the time taken to review / repeat certain steps, like the exact settings for color space transforms. It's helpful to see / hear that process many times.

Could you post a link to a replay of the Color Management Masterclass from September 20th? I had a color session and was unable to watch live.