I noticed the following Apple Color article via the excellent AE Portal blog. Oliver Peters has a nice writeup for DV Magazine on Apple’s grading application, you can read it online here. Here are a few snippets that I found informative.

“…Color is a pleasure, but it isn’t the only Final Cut grading solution you’ll ever use. There are still plenty of reasons to use the three-way corrector or plug-ins like Magic Bullet Colorista to correct or enhance a handful of shots inside FCP. To get the most out of Apple Color, it’s worth it to plan a color-grading pass into your routine…

“…2-minute 1080i clip—with several layers of grading and an added Color FX Film Grain filter—took between 14 and 17 minutes to render on a Mac Pro (two dual-core Xeons) with 8GB RAM and the ATI X1900 XT graphics card. A similar DV clip took about 11 minutes…”

“…you can’t slave audio with the picture. Final Cut’s three-way color settings translate but don’t really match in Color. Overall, the quality is superb, but I was disappointed with the blur effects. You can’t add a soft-focus effect from the vignettes in the Secondaries. Doing so requires a Color FX filter, and I thought these looked crunchy on highly compressed media such as XDCAM HD and DVCPRO HD. At least one handy feature—adding notes to shots in the list view—doesn’t work yet. And, finally, there is only one undo.”

For more Color-related articles and info, check out AE Portal’s short list of links.