CameraBag Cinema
A powerful video-grading tool
$99 Developer Nevercenter, nevercenter.com Requirements OS X 10.9 or later
Video grading isn’t usually for the fainthearted. The process of adjusting the color and tone of your footage can be a daunting concept that many keen movie makers don’t have the confidence to dabble with. Enter Camerabag Cinema, which makes the process incredibly user-friendly. Place the pointer over a thumbnail to cycle through examples of what each of this app’s tools can do to your clip’s colors and tones. Tools can be combined in a modular fashion for a range of results. Presets help you get going with instant effects, and you can tweak their sliders for unique looks.
The presets also help you mimic the colors and tones produced by analog film stock, with a number of added artefacts such as vignetted edges and film grain that complete the look.
The added level of adjustment to these presets creates a more realistic filmic style than you can get using iMovie’s rather limited presets.
One of the apps’s most powerful features is its ability to adjust tones and colors using curves. After adding a curve preset to create a flat contrast (which helps you see detail in the shadows and highlights), you’re able to drag points on the curve to adjust shadow and highlight levels separately. The clean interface means you can alter your clip’s look without being distracted by panels. Nevercenter advises having 4GB of memory, but more is better, as rendering can take a while. On an iMac with 24GB of memory it took just over five minutes to render a 13-second, 4K clip.
the bottom line. Intuitive and simple, this is an invaluable addition to any video editor’s toolset.