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I am a long time photographer and have been doing more video work over the past few years. One constant source of angst when I need to correct the coloring of the video clips in FCPx. With photographs, I am used to very tight, quick and accurate control over the color and being able to match colors from a wide variety of sources and resulting output being able to look the same.

What I am really looking for is the ability to the same kind of color correction as available in Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, or even Aperture from inside FCPx. For example, I would love to target a particular color and shift it (oranges shifted more magenta, blues a little less green, etc.) And for the rest: recovery, brightness, black, etc. would be marvelous to have the same control.

What FCPx gives me are these very broad-brush, difficult to use, inaccurate tools. I must click and drag a 'light', 'medium', 'dark' and 'overall' slider around to a particular color range and hope it's OK. It's very crude and has none of the finesse and accuracy I can get with Lightroom. There is no ability to target specific colors and work with them individually.

Is there any plug in, tool or something that will enable me to have the same color mastery of video color correction that I now exercise over photography?

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    Try DaVinci Resolve lite. It's professional colorist software with most of the features of the full version, and it's free. blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
    – Jason Conrad
    May 28, 2014 at 21:57
  • thanks jason. do you have any suggestions for a decent coloring tutorial for resolve in an fcpx workflow?
    – horace
    May 29, 2014 at 22:54
  • Anything by Alexis Van Hurkman. He does plenty of free tuts on youtube, and he has an excellent training series for sale on rippletraining.com youtube.com/results?search_query=+alexis+van+hurkman rippletraining.com/categories/avid-adobe-davinci-courses/…
    – Jason Conrad
    May 30, 2014 at 11:32
  • @JasonConrad so... with Resolve (lite) do I have to export out of FCPX, import into Resolve and possibly export and import back into FCPX? If I understand right it's not a plugin to work with footage already imported in FCPX?
    – Anentropic
    Aug 18, 2015 at 8:58
  • @Anetropic Yes, you'll need to roundtrip between FCPX and Resolve, but Resolve is pretty smart about it. You can both import and export .fcpxml files with Resolve, so you're only really exchanging information about the edits, not the whole rendered movie. And yes, you're right, Resolve isn't a plugin, it's a full app. With release 11 (and now 12 beta), it's editing toolset is becoming stronger all the time.
    – Jason Conrad
    Aug 18, 2015 at 15:55

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I second using Resolve, but there are a few "hidden" color tools you can access if you have Motion, or know someone who does.

Motion allows you to publish effects for use in FCPX and can be transferred from one machine to another.

See this post from creativecow for a downloadable zip which includes Brightness, Channel Mixer, Color Balance, Colorize, Contrast, Gamma, and Hue/Saturation.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/14335

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