ProVideo Coalition.com: the EDITBLOG on PVC by Scott Simmons

A bit earlier this year Euphonix began shipping its highly anticipated MC Color control surface. This unit was designed for use with Apple Color and has been welcomed by Color users to add another option to their hardware based control surface choices. Until the MC Color came along your choices were either one of the JL Cooper units or the more affordable Tangent Wave. At $1,499 the MC Color doesn’t break what I think is the magic $999 mark (magic in the sense that it will put a control surface in the hands of a lot more users) but it’s right along side the Wave in price and less than the JL Cooper offerings. The MC Color is also a very new unit. There’s a few glitches and bugs than can probably be worked out in software but the hardware is what it is at this point and there’s both a lot to like and a missing feature in the hardware itself. But there’s one thing that’s certain, the MC Color makes the Color application much more useful than a mouse alone.

I wrote down some first impression of the MC Color the weekend that I got the unit in hand. To recap those (you can also read the whole article here): The MC Color, while it has its fair share of plastic in the construction, is well built and looks right at home on your desk. It’s smaller than the Tangent Wave and from looks alone appears to be a more “professional” looking unit, though that type of thing is totally subjective. To me the Wave looks more like a toy with its red trackballs, blue displays, big knobs and its expansive plastic surface. The MC Color can be elevated by individually adjustable plastic feet built into the bottom of the unit or lifted even further with included riser brackets. You’ll be able to easier integrate the MC Color on a desk with a keyboard or tablet due to its overall smaller size than the Wave. I do wish the trackballs had some type of locking mechanism instead of just resting in their sockets. I never spilled them out once they were in place but someone was in my room examining the unit and out they went into the floor.

You’ll really enjoy the quality of the trackballs and especially the trackwheels

I think easily the two most professional features on the MC Color are the look of the OLED displays and the feel of the trackwheels. The displays are bright and easy to read. Each letter is made up of lots of little tiny dots so it’s very highend looking with a nice font. The trackwheels are weighted well; heavy but easy to move and very smooth. They are a pleasure to use over the Tangent Wave’s dials that sit above the trackballs.

That’s the obvious question that many, including myself, have asked: if you had to purchase only one, which would it be? The Euphonix MC Color or the Tangent Wave? But that’s jumping ahead.

Connection and setup

The MC Color uses an Ethernet connection so it’s a bit more work than a simple USB plug. I connected the test unit to two different Mac Pros. Newer Mac Pro’s have two Ethernet ports and on one of the Mac Pros I couldn’t get the MC Color to work with the open port. Moving to the other port I had to disconnect my Internet connection to get it to see the MC Color. Now that was probably just some user error and I didn’t take time to really troubleshoot the one Ethernet port but I think it’s worth noting in that’s a different setup than the simplicity of USB. With the other Mac Pro (which get its Internet via hardwire too) I plugged the MC Color into the open port and it saw the unit just fine.

Depending on your configuration you might have to plug into a router to get a connection. It’s obviously not as simple as a USB plug but the Ethernet connection and the EuControl software can allow the integration of many different Euphonix products. And those products can work together on different computers in ways that I don’t entirely understand. I think the point here is that this gives the MC Color (and all Euphonix products) some real expandability that a USB-plugged Tangent Wave won’t have. If that’s important as you grow a facility then it will factor into which unit you might purchase.

You have to establish the MC Color in the EU Control software to get Color to recognize it. I got into the habit of checking the EuCon control panel before launching Color to make sure EuCon saw the unit its Surfaces tab:

The EuControl software allows for details setup of all Euphonix products. Click Add to add the unit to the My Surfaces window

You also have to remember to power the MC Color on with its power button before you connect in Color. Something which I admit I forgot a time or two. While there’s something very simple about a single USB connection you can see the power that Ethernet allows while checking out the EuControl software. It’s quite involved and very customizable for a whole ecosystem of Euphonix products.

You must choose the Euphonix unit in Apple Color

And then you’ll see the connection happen on the MC Color itself

Operation

Using the MC Color is simple and will be familiar if you’ve ever worked with a control surface before. The 3 large trackwheels surrounding the trackballs dominate the unit and are a joy to use. The trackballs control the Shadow, Midtone and Highlight color wheels and the trackwheels the black point, midtone and white point sliders, just like you would expect them too. There’s two reset buttons next to each of the three trackwheels. The six rotary knobs adjust any number of functions depending on what room you are in and what tab is selected. The rotary knobs also press down for a button which is usually a reset. The knobs are touch sensitive to show the numeric parameter where you are currently sitting when they are touched. A nice touch if you will. Above each of the trackwheels lies three softkeys that can control any number of functions and be customized to your liking. A shift key on both the left and right sides of the unit allows a second function for each softkey.

Overall the MC Color is a good looking and well constructed unit

Visually the MC Color will look good in an edit or color grading suite. The OLED display looks professional and the buttons include an orange toggle light in the middle. There’s a lot of buttons on the MC Color and the only place where I think it looks cramped is on the right side where the transport control buttons seem a bit crammed in. There aren’t dedicated buttons to move you to different rooms so you have to press the NAV (navigation) key on the lower left side of the unit. Then the displays will change to reflect the rooms. Press down on the encoder knob to move to the desired room. When in a room with two rows of info on the display, the lower row of info corresponds to the encoder knobs. You’ll also get to really know the PAGE and BANK buttons quite well but more on that later. There’s also 4 copy grade and 4 paste grade buttons on the right side of the unit as well, handy for easy access to grades you’ll frequently use during a session.

To sum up operation of the MC Color: It’s a real pleasure to roll the trackballs, turn the knobs and spin the trackwheels ... but you will be pushing a lot of buttons.

A few bugs still lurking around

One place where I felt like I was seeing the “1.0-ness” of the MC Color was in Color’s Secondary room. Missing from the rotary encoder knobs seemed to be the Global Hue parameter. That’s probably not the biggest lost since that particular parameter probably isn’t used as much as the other. A quick glance also makes it appear that the basic Saturation parameter is missing too. But MC Color lists the Saturation Secondaries as Shadow Sat, Midtone Sat and Highlight Sat, in that order. The Color interface lists them as Saturation, Highlight Sat. and Shadow Sat., in that order. It might be a minor complaint but it seems to me the controls on the control surface should match the name and the layout order of the software interface as best they can. This makes it easier (and quicker) to understand the relationship between the software and hardware. And that brings up a question ... In the Secondaries tab is the MC Color only manipulating midtone saturations with that knob when the Color interface displays it as overall saturation? I think not as twisting the Midtone Sat knob on the MC Color changes the overall saturation of the picture. I’m not sure why they would have made the hardware labels different from the interface’s software labels. Another example of the MC Color labels not matching Color is in the HSL Qualifier of the Secondary room. Apple uses the terms center, range and tolerance (check the HSL Controls of the Color user manual) to describe the HSL Qualifier controls but the rotary encoders use the terms center, spread and falloff:

I believe the Tangent Wave did something similar so maybe that’s the proper colorist terms and Apple has it wrong. That said it is very nice to have rotary knob controls for adjusting all the parameters of the HSL Qualifiers. It makes using the HSL controls very easy and much simpler to gain a good key than the click and drag of the mouse alone. Possibly some of these naming issues have been changed by the time you read this review.

Another bug seems to be that the MC Color doesn’t always automatically enable the Secondaries when you begin working on them. In Apple Color 1.0 the user had to manually check the Enabled check box to get the Secondaries working. You might often have one of those moments of frustration as you kept changing a parameter with no results only to realize you didn’t check Enabled. When you finally did BOOM! There was a big difference. Now with Color 1.5 you can click into the Secondaries room for the first time, change a parameter and Color automatically enables the Enabled check box ... as it should. If you move into Secondaries via the MC Color and start to twirl away you usually won’t see the result as it doesn’t automatically enable. There is a Toggle Secondary button mapped to one of the Soft Keys and this will turn the Secondaries on and off but you shouldn’t have to push it the first time. I would expect this to be fixed in a software update, if it hasn’t been already. I did notice that the MC Color would automatically enable the secondaries when I toggled the Mouse Injection mode and selected the eye dropper to grab an HSL Qualifier. It seems odd that it would sometimes and wouldn’t others.

Euphonix has also made it easy to access more than one secondary via the hardware:

It’s nice to have hardware access to choose different Secondaries

When you are in the Secondary room a press of the shift + NAVigation key will change the display to read Second 1 - 6 and you can move to other secondary tabs via a rotary knobs pressdown. With six knobs you get six secondary tabs and then a press of the PAGE > button takes you to a button for Second7. Now there are eight secondary tabs in the Color Secondary room so don’t ask me why MC Color only goes to 7 when there’s five more blank buttons.

And one other odd thing was a Position indicator showing up in the Secondary room when I pressed the Shift button. If I then adjusted the trackball the entire picture moved. This corresponded to Position X and Y in the Geometry room and the parameter could be reset again in the Geometry room. I’m not sure if this Position X and Y access in the Secondary room was a feature or a bug but if it’s a bug (it felt like a bug) I’m sure if can be fixed in software too. Speaking of Geometry bugs, the rotary knobs are setup by default to Scale, Rotation, and Flip (no Aspect Ratio in there). While the twisting of the knobs worked for Scale and Rotation the press down button function of the knobs didn’t work for any of them in the Geometry room. That has to be another bug so it must be fixable as well.

Next up: With a lot of control comes a lot of learning, and which would I buy

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Thanks for the follow article on this hardware. I did a bunch of reading on both the MC Color and the Tangent Wave a couple of months ago. Your conclusion is one of the most helpful I’ve read in a long time.

The answer that everyone wants is “which one should I get?” and there is no wrong answer which can be frustrating. I still want and need to play with both in person but I would definitely fall in the use it here and there camp and not remotely as a full time grader.

There are things on the Tangent Wave that on paper, I feel I would prefer much better. But the size of the Wave is impossible to ignore.

Ultimately, I will probably hold off on buying a control surface since I don’t truly need it right now. Maybe one of the second versions of these panels will make the decision easier.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/03 at 04:51 PM

It is one of those decisions where it would be best if one could use each unit for a full session ... but that’s not realistic. It’s also not realistic for many to be able to even touch both before a purchase either. But the good thing is that both of them have strengths and weaknesses but whichever you might buy I think you’ll be happy with it.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 05/03 at 08:21 PM

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