Most editing programs can do basic grading once you have telecined your film to video. More sophisticated programs can do a lot more, for example allowing you to individually control the colors of different parts of the shot.

I believe what you are looking for is something like Discreet (now Autodesk) Lustre. This was in fact the app they were using in the "making of" footage for LOTR (if i'm thinking of the same footage you were refering to.) But also as MarkG said, most editing apps these days have very decent color correction/adjustment features built in.

Here is a link to Autodesk Lustre if you want to have a look:
?url? http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7668806?/url?

Premiere Pro version 1 and up has some decent colour grading tools, but it is limited to the whole image.

Afetr Effects the latest versions are better allow you to apply the grading to in to specific areas on the screen (mattes) like they did in Lord of the Rings, just highlighting the eyes as the move, After Effects allows for the creation of a trackling matte then applying the colour grading to that matte.

Autodesk Lustre is what they used in Lord of the Rings but it is expensive as well.

It all depends on what you want to achieve with the colour grading, make sure you consult with your DP because he might need to give you an over exposure of 1/2 stop in order to capture that little but more detail knowing you are going to grade the image in post. This part is possibly the most important part of the process. I worked as the editor on a film that was shot a few years back. When shot, the DP was dead set hopeless, they were shooting night for day, which is all finem, but by not giving enough detail in the darker shadows for me to highlight anything come time to grade the picture, it made it very difficult because if I needed to bring the brightness up of a certain area, teh detail isn't there, a problem with DV. But if he had known the director wanted a colour grade done, then they should have given a slightly over exposed image than required (I am not talking about over exposure to the point where everything that is bright loses detail as well, but making it 1/2 stop brighter can make the difference in the grading process.

Also to note. If you are working on Film. there is a level of grading done during the Telecine process. Not much, but during the telecine process they will before a grade of the image. So be wary of the lab as well to make sure they give you the intermediate as is.

I hope this helps.

Michael Rogers
McRogson

I use Fxhome VisionLab Studios, it can grade your film and do many more things.

H.A.

Truelight is a fantastic grading system. Expensive to buy/hire however.

http://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products.html

After Effects can give you some good control if you want to correct or change areas of the frame and not everything in it. It is time consuming though but a good, effective budget way of attaining what you might want.

FCP has a fairly intuitive colour correction system, probably the best out of the standard under 10k systems. With plug-ins, more can be achieved. Tinderbox do a good range.

The new version of FCP studio (announced at NAB this month) includes a new program called Color, which is made specifically for advanced color grading. I haven't gotten my hands on the program yet, but it looks to be quite powerful.

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Andrew Gingerich
Exploding Goldfish Films
Check out my vodcast on iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=96931870
and my blog at http://www.exgfilms.com

unfortunately there is no software that does it. there are colourists who use software/hardware to do that.

during grading (also nowadays not 100 % accurately referred to as DI - digital intermediate) you change the chrominance and luminance values of your footage.
put simple you change the colour.
you control values like saturation,brightness,contrast,gain,gamma,hue seperately in the rgb channels and at least in the darks, mids and highs.
often colour curves and luts are used for even more control.

full blown grading suites are for instance davinci,filmlight, baselight,quantel iQ/eQ/pablo, lustre, digital vision, scratch

there are compositing apps that provide with enough colourcontrol so that you could do grading on them as well:
fusion,shake,nuke,toxik,afterfx etc.

and some editing tools like avid,fcp or premiere could be used too.

but all these have no magic buttons to give you the lotr look. you have to know what you are doing to tell the software where to change what.....

I suggest you learn about grading or if you don't want to do that to get someone into your team who knows about that. hiring a post house or buying grading suites will most likely be out of the question anyways I guess.....)8

grading suites go usually for a few 100k. the cheapest is around 50k

compositing apps cost around 5k give or take a few k...

colourists go for few 100bucks a day plus equipment rental.

cheapest thing would probably be to check out all the colourcontrol tools the apps you have give you. play around.

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?i?Originally posted by digitalblade?/i?
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unfortunately there is no software that does it. there are colourists who use software/hardware to do that.

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This is a very good point. The reason the colors in Lord of the Rings look so great has little to do with what software they used and more to do with the expertise and artistry of the colorists. Remember that colorists used to not have any software--just chemicals--and the results still looked pretty darn impressive. Grading software makes it easier and cheaper to play with the colors of your source footage, but it doesn't make it any easier to get good results.

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Andrew Gingerich
Exploding Goldfish Films
Check out my blog at http://www.exgfilms.com
and my reel at http://portfolio.exgfilms.com