Grass Valley Expands Bones For Color-Correction

Grass Valley rattled its Bones at its pre-NAB press event in Palm Springs this week, introducing version 2.5, with optional color-correction and image-stabilization modules. With the new functionality, Grass Valley has positioned Bones ‘ previously notable mainly for offering control of a Spirit DataCine ‘ as full-fledged software-based DI, with a bare-bones system starting at $30,000.

That much money buys you basically the underlying Bones framework, a single plug-in module, and some hardware. If you need more than just the one module — say you want to scan film and do color-correction — the price begins to scale upward, topping out in the neighborhood of $180,000 for a fully loaded system. In addition to Color, which complies with the ASC’s spec for color decision lists (basically, it’s the colorist’s equivalent of an editor’s EDL), add-on modules for the system include Mover, which controls scanners and tape drives; Scaler, which offers resizing and format conversion; Repair, for semi-automated and manual retouching; the new Stabilizer, offering multipoint tracking and stabilization; and third-party plug-ins using Bones’ OFX API platform from the likes of The Foundry and Photron.

In a demo, Grass Valley’s marketing manager Michael Schneider described a workflow that would involve multiple seats of Bones working with data from a central server such as ADIC’s Store Next or SGI’s CXFS (the latter would require a 64-bit version of Bones, which is coming soon). “Hardware is not the cost factor anymore,” he said. “You can easily afford multiple systems at your facility, and that makes it highly flexible.”

Grass Valley’s other big post initiative this year is to evangelize the LUTher color-space converter, which allows precise calibration across multiple displays. Essentially, you measure two different images, and then translate the color-space difference between two of then into a 3D LUT, which you load into the LUTher to match images between the two for more accurate viewing on-set and elsewhere.

D.P. David Stump was on hand to describe the on-set workflow for What Love Is, a feature film shot with four Vipers. Basically, the Vipers are sending RAW FilmStream data into Sony SRW-1 recorders, which are in turn feeding data into LUTher boxes. The LUThers have been set up with a Technicolor LUT loaded onto a PowerBook that corrects the image for viewing without altering the data that’s being recorded to the SRW-1s. That color-corrected signal is sent to 23-inch LCD monitors on set, and then is finally downconverted so that 4:2:2 SD LUT-corrected dailies can be recorded to VTRs. The whole process is automatic ‘ monitoring the preliminary color-corrections happens simultaneously with acquisition of uncorrected footage, and corrected dailies are ready as soon as the cameras are shut down.

“One of the keys was immediacy,” said Stump, referring to limitations imposed by the indie film’s budget. “We would shoot a scene, and a half-hour later an assistant editor would come down with a copy of what we had just shot cut together in some fashion.” Stump copped to being a color-correction junkie, constantly grabbing frames from waveform vectorscopes and grading them with software tools like Iridas SpeedGrade.