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Resistance Is Futile – Assimilate Inc’s Scratch For Color and Finishing

December 25^th, 20154

Resistance Is Futile - Assimilate Inc's Scratch For Color and Finishing

by Richard LackeyDecember 25^th, 2015

While DaVinci Resolve may have become the household name for color correction, there are some fantastic alternatives worth your time and attention. Assimilate Scratch is definitely one of them. Some things to look into over the holidays, if you want.

Assimilate offer a 30 day free trial of Scratch, which you can register for here. Scratch is offered on a subscription basis, and from now until Dec 31st Assimilate are offering one year for only $495.

Scratch has a long history in the professional digital intermediate space and was the first platform with native support for REDcode RAW with the launch of the RED One. In fact, Scratch gave me my start into the world of color correction when data centric file based workflows were only just starting to gain traction. This was before Blackmagic Design acquired DaVinci Systems, and even before the rise and fall of Apple Color. So even though the name may be new to you, rest assured they are not new to digital color correction and finishing.

Scratch

On-set dailies, playback and review, conform, color grading, versioning, compositing and finishing, Assimilate Scratch is a total beginning to end digital workflow solution.

If you are coming to Scratch from DaVinci Resolve, the GUI, toolset and methods in Scratch are quite different and will take some time to become familiar, but it’s well worth the time to learn. The following video will familiarise you with the layout, workflow and where to find the tools.

Scratch Play

Assimilate have built one of the most flexible media players for digital cinema professionals, and the best thing is it’s completely free. Scratch Play is compatible with pretty much every production and camera format and allows you to set up multiple stacked timelines (constructs) and manage unlimited versions of your clips. You can set up looks, resize, manage and create LUTS, making Scratch Play a fantastic tool to have with you on set.

Scratch Web

Scratch Web is Assimilate’s cloud based collaborative review platform. You can publish clips or entire timelines to your own secure Scratch Web Channel. You can share content with everyone, or just select project collaborators. Collaborators can view your channel on any web browser from smartphone, tablet or computer. The most powerful feature of Scratch Web is that along with your media, you can publish all metadata associated with the timeline (construct) to the cloud based timeline.