I may have asked for this before and I know it's been mentioned many times, and I know people say get Baselight Editions or use Resolve, which I do. But a large majority of work I do in UK broadcast, for finishing is still done on Symphony. I simply can't understand why development has crawled to a halt, when there is still such a market. And please open it up to 3rd party control surfaces like Tangent. Tracking is still abysmal particularly, although shapes are poor too, they are at least workable, mostly. In online I use Mocha via BCC, all the time and it would be good to use that in colour grading too. Metadata for clips is still based on tape workflows and this needs serious attention too.

Amen to all this

As a complete newcomer to Avid (still evaluating it), with a kind of "fresh view" on things, my guess is that they are still improving on the basics (Colour Management, ACES etc), to be followed by a complete upgrade of the grading tools to modern standards.

I mean, this must be their plan, right?

I can't imagine there will be any grading improvements to come. I hacve expected the symphony option to just be consumed into the standard MC and can't see why that hasn't happened. 

But it looks like Avid have given up onn that level of finishing. 

Mercer, I also use it every day. It's such a dog. Shapes are a joke. No one from Avid ever chimes in when Symphony is mentioned. It's like their disfigured child that lives under the stairs. For goodness sake, at least let us NAME THE BUCKETS so we know which correction is which! It's like being forced to play some awful memory game where the winner finds the correct grade and the loser has to Ctrl+Z in to oblivion. There should be unlimited buckets too, not 8. There are so many simple tweaks they could do to improve it.

If the title tool is anything to go by, we'll all be long gone by the time Avid gets round to Symphony. 

Andi

Buckets are just awful, Andi. I never use them, I just copy and paste grades from a bin. I'm currently working on 2018 via Terradici, offlining and I was assesing the other day what if anything I would lose by going back to it on my own system and I can't see one significant thing, actually. Agree on shapes but I can just about use them unlike tracking. Secondary is very crude. Avid used to so different, they really have lost their way. Last year I onlined 2 series of a popular consumer review TV show and all the editors were using Marquee for titles - I hadn't messed with Marquee in 10 years! But they had no option. Luckily for Avid, UK TV is still mostly HD.

Hey Everyone,

Chris Bove asked me to comment on this string.  I just want to let you know we are working on a lot of renovations in this area.  We've hired an editor and have them on staff on our design team.  Yes, the 32-bit float timeline with ACES and orther color processing was a bit of a start to this, but really the tools are the part you are most interested in us improving.  It's hard to devulge a lot of information here so I'm just here to say we agree with you, hear your comments and are working to make changes.  We've spent the better part of 4 years renovating most of Media Composer and this are is where we are keen to make improvements.

Dave

Dave Avid PM:

We've spent the better part of 4 years renovating most of Media Composer and this are is where we are keen to make improvements.

 

Thank you for responding to this Dave, very encouraging to hear. Although you can't divulge much yet, would that include control surfaces too?

Nice to hear that Symphony is going to be renovated. I thought it was a fast sinking ship.

Looking forward to the update in the near future.

CinéMatica:

Nice to hear that Symphony is going to be renovated. I thought it was a fast sinking ship.

Looking forward to the update in the near future.

Yes, we would absolutely consider control surfaces

Supporting surfaces like tangent, maximising the symphony UI, ditching the nameless buckets, giving acces to the raw settings inside symphony would be a good start.

And if shapes are to work you need to be able to resize the CC viewers, add shapes off screen and have better access to keyframes. I don't like having to jump in and out of effects mode and cc mode, it should all be available in one place. They also need to be independant of each other. Adjusting one shape should not affect all the other shapes. There should be an option to gang them so they all do the same thing or un-gang them so they act as seperate unique adjustments.

Tracking needs to be better, secondary key refinements need to be better, granularity of all manipulation points needs to be way better across the board not just in HDR modes. There should be a grade "gallery" to easily compare grades and something that is very important for me would be the ability to split screen (horizonal, vertical, custom) different frames for camera matching, not just before and after of the same frame - that is almost useless. These split screens should be able to be independantly adjusted so I could for example, zoom in and move around on one of them but keep the other the same size.

Better and more scopes and break them out to float seperately. Properly display digital code values depending on what bit depth you are woking in. 

The ability to apply segment or master mode before or after the cursor (or within in and out points) so you don't have to flattern the whole sequence but don't accidentally tweak a grade further down the timeline and screw up all your grades from the same tape at the beginning of the timeline. And to add to that, undoing a grade should not undo the mode you are in, it's tedious to constantly flip between segment and master every time you undo and it reverts.

All metadata columns should be able to be used to choose how source side corrections are applied. 

Grades should remain when you close and re-open the program or be able to be saved within the module (not draggng tonnes of clips to bins and renaming them) so I could restore a generic set of grade templates if I am working on a recurring project, and should be able to be exported to other machines or linked to settings somehow so when I load my settings my default grades are loaded too along with my workspaces.

Build in some good noise reduction too and let us define where it is placed in the processing. 

Merging corrections is good and works well, don't mess with it!

Andi

100% agree with all your points Andi, particulalrly:

ripvanmarlowe:

All metadata columns should be able to be used to choose how source side corrections are applied.

ripvanmarlowe:

Better and more scopes and break them out to float seperately. Properly display digital code values depending on what bit depth you are woking in. 

ripvanmarlowe:

There should be a grade "gallery" to easily compare grades

ripvanmarlowe:

And to add to that, undoing a grade should not undo the mode you are in, it's tedious to constantly flip between segment and master every time you undo and it reverts.

Please make it be high performance, GPU accelerated.

A modern toolset that should be innovative, not just a long overdue catchup with the competition.

I could'nt agree more, those requests are exactly what we need. I think the idea is to refine what's already there and bring better user experience, no need to try and compete with Baselight or other dedicated color apps. Symphony should just be the tool for quick turnaround projects that can't afford conforming and hiring a colorist.

ripvanmarlowe:

granularity of all manipulation points needs to be way better across the board not just in HDR modes

All your points are spot on, I think we don't need much more for symphony to become a really useful in app tool, maybe a couple of sliders allowing to tweak the WB and ISO raw settings without going into source settings and a new tool that delivers something ressembling the HUE SHIFT sliders in Baselight.