You always could have multiple color boards in FCP X - with '+'.

I'm not affiliated with anyone at Color Grading Central Here's a link to NoFilmSchool's voucher: the new LUT manager lets you put LUTs in custom folders (so no more scrolling through endless lists of LUTs). It's nice to have traditional colour wheels back too. Color FInale is not as powerful as a full-blown nodes system like Resolve of course, but I could see it becoming my one and only colour tool within FCPX. This is a big improvement on my FCPX LUT workflow up til now, because by default FCPX only gives you very limited control over what order effects are applied in: it only lets you change the order of effects within the 'effects' section of the inspector pane (ie it doesn't let you sandwich, say, a colour-board correction between two effects slots, or two colour-board corrections either side of an effect or a LUT if you wanted to do something like that you'd need to use an RT adjustment layer, or nest a clip inside a compound clip). For instance, I've got a primary curves correction, then a LUT, then a secondary curves correction on top of that.

The best thing about Color Finale though is that it gathers all your most commonly used colour tools (LUT, curves, wheels, lift/gain/gamma) in a single window, and lets you add multiple instances of a given tool, change the order they are all applied in, adjust the opacity for each one, flick them on and off, rename them etc. There is a split second delay when flicking between clips for the newly-selected clip's settings to appear in the window. This windowed approach is what all plugins for FCPX should use for their interface IMO, rather than overlays on the main video display. Performance is nice and snappy (even on my bottom-of-the-range Macbook Air). I don't think this is a huge issue, as most of us have large primary displays, and probably want to colour correct on the primary display anyway. (I don't have any 4K/ retina displays, so can't comment on how well it scales). The only slight disappointment with the windowing is that although you can drag the window to a secondary display, if you start selecting different clips the window snaps back to your primary display. If you have color finale open for a bunch of different clips it will switch to represent the settings of whichever clip is currently selected (ie it behaves as you'd expect it would). It plays nice with fullscreen mode too.

If you have the window open for one shot but shut for another, it will disappear and reappear depending on whether you have selected a clip that you have color finale open for (does that make sense?).

Putting all the colour controls in their own floating window works well. I've been playing with the 7-day trial of Color Finale.

Color finale login