Right, let's get this section of the forum rolling.

Has anyone here used Speedgrade? Or better yet, used Speedgrade *and* Colorista II? I've been looking to buy Colorista II for a few months, about to pull the trigger, but if Speedgrade is promising it might make more sense to wait for CS 6.

I like the idea of grading right inside After Effects with a plugin rather than farming it out to a separate app - a la Mocha AE - so that's probably one point for Colorista.

Anyone have thoughts on the similarities and differences in these two pieces of software?

All I can say is I am incredibly happy with Colorista II, and it is available now.

I, too, am interested in Speedgrade, but Colorista II is what I use on my pro work (and sometimes just Colorista Free!)

Cheers.

If you can afford to wait, then you might as well wait, but... if you need to do some work now, Colorista II is ridiculously solid (in AE, it's buggy for me in PPro, not as much in FCP).

I'm grading as we speak in a big old loop from PPro to AE and back to PPro with Dynamic Link. With ProLost's DVRebelTools (it's available for free on the prolost.com and I love it) grading is very fast for After Effects, minus any true realtime playback, but overall pretty powerful.

I'm looking forward to Speedgrade and what it might offer, but to get the work done in the meantime, you've got to get what you need. Right now I need (rather, like to use) Colorista II and I'm happy with it.

I don't know if that helps?

Later .

Thanks very much, Grant and AJ! I think I'll go ahead and grab Colorista since everyone seems to be very happy with it in AE, and then if Speedgrade eventuates I can use that as well.

Colorista 2 has been wonderful for me - I use it in Premiere CS5. It's very stable and provides a great set of tools. I really love the 3-Way setup.

Adobe has a video on there site introducing speed grade. Just from watching that video I can say that speed grade has a ton of features that Colorista does not. Once speed grade is out I'll be using Colorista and speed grade side by side. Just will depend on the project as for which is best.

So I ended up waiting for Speed Grade - and it's awesome! Just getting into it, really enjoying the interface, seems like it can function in a simple way, or you can dig quite deep into it. Love the fact that it's set up for handling stereoscopic footage as well!

I grabbed a copy of Colorista II on Friday during a flash coupon, and I'm really enjoying it. I recently just upgraded my edit computer and went from CS5 to CS6, and while I've found Speedgrade powerful, I find that Colorista II is, on the whole, faster to use in terms of both ease of use and render times. Not to say I wouldn't load up Speedgrade for the right project - I'm with you on that, Alex - but for a lot of the work I do, just a few minutes in Colorista and I can really get my images to pop.