The Boutique DI

AMSTERDAM – Software color-correction was all the rage at IBC, as vendors in the DI market extended their commercial strategies to take the DI ethos, first perfected for movies, down to the boutique level and into other production sectors like commercials. As da Vinci and Pandora work to reinvent themselves, top dogs Thomson and Discreet are keeping careful watch on up-and-comers in the field, knowing that only an amalgamated combo of, say, Nucoda, The Foundry and FilmLight could threaten them. The one danger to all vendors is the perceived cost of DI technology – and, paradoxically, the need to keep it exclusive enough to protect the business plans to which the industry has committed.

Thomson had three film imaging products of real note – the DataCine 4K, the color-space converter LUTher and the very impressive Bones platform, plus the real-time, 16-bit grain reducer Scream reduced to a plug-in board.

Shown as the CSC 4000 in Vegas, LUTher is the precise hardware Spirit owners desperately needed. It is not a color-management product as such, because Thomson doesn’t feel the need to repeat development work done by Kodak, Arri and FilmLight. It comes with 4:4:4 RGB, I/O for SD and HD, and the full specification color cube (256 x 256 x 256).

Bones is powerful software, supporting plug-ins via OpenFX, that runs on cheap PC platforms running Linux and builds through a series of modules: Transfer, which replaces the Phantom TE; Mover, a project manager; and the resolution-independent Scaler, which does pan-and-scan and upconversions (to 6K) and downconversions.

Cintel sold a first dataMill to Munich’s Scan Werk. The product handles all formats from Super 8 to 65mm. It self calibrates, works at 10-bit log, outputs SD and HD in calibrated form, and delivers 2K images at 15 fps and 4K images at 3.8 fps.

Managing Director Adam Welsh said the DI culture is spreading. "Even commercials will follow the same methodology," he said. "The dataMill covers every base in DI, and it’s also been apparent it will be used with HD for SD dailies. Users are wary of [the most expensive] machines, and the slower scanners can’t give you SD dailies or HD in real-time. At $555,000 it sits on its own. The volume DI market still has to come because 95 percent of movies are still finished traditionally. This will reverse in the next three years. In the meantime, companies like Assimilate are interesting because the big companies are overpricing the solution for DI."

Cintel also showed the imageMill processing platform running grain-reduction toolset Grace-in-a-box. First takers include Sunset Digital and Technicolor.

For fans of Nucoda, seeing plug-ins (fed from The Foundry via OpenFX) rendered on the CPU and color-correction rendered on the GPU was a definite real-time 2K plus. A demo of GPU processing aided by an NVidia FX4000 HD card and a Bright Systems SAN showed that in real-time you get key isolation, shapes, softness and color-correction, with no need for rendering or proxies.

Nucoda appealed to the HD market, showing Film Master 2.5 performing real-time finishing and grading of 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 with film or HD in and film or HD out. Video content producers will appreciate video batch capture, A- and C-mode rendering and VTR emulation options. V2.5 also introduces integrated quality control, a new keyer and new isolation tools.

The Speed-FX clustering technology FilmLight showed in the form of a high-bandwidth workstation at NAB has morphed into Baselight 4X and 8X: grading tools aimed at the movie industry’s hero suites and HDTV. These cost from $160,000, and offer the option of a 4K real-time grade or two 2K real-time streams, either with primaries and secondaries, plus dissolves.

FilmLight also talked up its forthcoming Northlight 2 scanner, armed with new 9K custom multi-tap TDI CCD sensors, an infrared option for scratch removal and dust-busting, and greater speed capability. It will run faster than 2 fps at 2K and 1 fps at 4K. The NorthLight has been given a software resizer (4K to 2K), which negates talk of aperture sharpening, looking at chromatic aberrations and yielding a resized frame without artifacts.

By implementing its color-correction algorithms on a Linux platform, da Vinci has created on-set color enhancement software that makes the Viper camera look like the movie-ready tool its wide dynamic range suggested it could be. This initiative results from a partnership between da Vinci, Thomson, and S.two for its DFR field record unit. It is strictly a pre-visualisation tool.

Viper’s output – flat and predominantly green – is usually measured as uncompressed 10-bit 4:4:4 RGB data. Now, however, directors and crews can view FilmStream raw data outputs and apply basic grading decisions that are reproduced when played back during color timing. The key elements are the color decision list tool, pan decision list tool, and the exploitation of DPX as a common file format.