Graders galore, scanners galore, LUTs galore. NAB is going to be a celebration, or maybe calibration, of the digital intermediate process. Cintel and Arri will try to muscle into the market at the expense of Thomson, Imagica and FilmLight, while Discreet and da Vinci battle it out at the top end of a grading sector that may yet be won by a new contender like Nucoda.
Color management is a hot topic this year at every point in production, from the laptop of the DP on location to the colorist and on to the tech overseeing a film-out. And digital cinema takes a decisive step toward resolving the controversy over "how many Ks is okay" when DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives) releases its final specification. The American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) will show a test film shot by Allen Daviau and projected in 4K that creates a benchmark that is said to match or beat 35mm premium answer-print quality.
A Volume Game
Da Vinci’s big product story will be resolution — color-grading at 2K and beyond, in offline, DI and real-time modes, with no rendering. The systems, which sport a new GUI, went out for alpha-testing in late March. Da Vinci will also introduce its CDL (color decision list), catering to new interest on the part of cinematographers in look-management tools that are not physically tied to post houses, says da Vinci VP of Marketing Matt Straeb. "An example would be on-set color correction or color correction in editing products which have a compatible algorithm from desktop to real-time systems found in facilities for finishing. Decisions are preserved and you don’t commit the data until you are ready to finish the project." Da Vinci’s DI system Nucleas allows its many 2K users to participate in the DI market by providing the ingest, color grading, conform and format tools to finish a project.
Making It Faster
Making the DI business viable is the strategy behind Cintel’s Data Mill, a data scanner capable of 2K operation at 15 fps and 4K operation at 3.8 fps. It comes with a calibrator so the colorist does not necessarily have to do the set-ups. In Vegas, the Data Mill will be feeding a DVS Clipster, demonstrating its 2K and 4K performance and network readiness.
Cintel’s second new product is the Image Mill, a generic box that runs Cintel’s Grace grain-reduction system as its first application. Other booth exhibits will be the DSX film scanner with Oliver and Grace and Millennium II — an entry-level, multi-standard machine with its own Grace system working up to 4K resolution.
Lustre 2 might be the most expensive film-grading tool out there, but expect a big push on new functionality in the shape of version 2.5 technology and more aggressive pricing as Discreet bids to prove that users can enjoy a huge return on investment. Discreet will offer hands-on training sessions featuring Smoke 6 on IBM Linux workstations and Combustion. Also in Discreet’s booth will be a theater with a calibrated 2K digital projector showcasing the DI workflow path used on Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World: Fire conform and editing, Lustre digital grading and color correction, Inferno VFX and the integration of Kodak’s new color management system. A DCI test film shot by Allen Daviau and scanned at 6K on a NorthLight demonstrated that proper color-grading and management technology could make a 16-bit 4K digital projection indistinguishable from a first-generation print, claims Discreet product manager Maurice Patel.
Quantel’s Generation 2 upgrade across its whole line spans both DI and general post work. After beta-testing in LA and Japan, it gives iQ and eQ new software and hardware combinations that boost media processing performance by 75 percent and plug-in processing performance by 280 percent. This tool gives the user many ways of looking — blender, camera, schematic process, and schematic DVE axis — and Generation 2 introduces unlimited layer compositing with unlimited processing on every layer. Other advances include completely embedded plug-ins (all fully archived as if a Quantel process), WM9 and QuickTime background import and export, QXML Net for third party work access, an audio publish feature that gets an audio edit with everything live into Pro Tools or Sadie, and custom transitions in the editor. Look-up tables can be imported to the system for film work, and the HDCAM SR support announced at IBC has been integrated, according to Quantel Post Business Manager Steve Owen.
Out of the Shadows
One of NAB’s must-see exhibits will be images shot with Kodak’s new 100T and 200T Vision2 stocks. DPs report better detail in highlight and shadow areas, truer colors, a more subtle grain structure, and improved fidelity for skin tones. Just as crucially, the stocks are optimized for both digital and optical finishing. Other Kodak technologies that have moved on are the image-enhancement algorithm for Super 16, the Telecine Calibration System, and the Look Management System (LMS), which was beta tested by director Mike Nichols and DP Stephen Goldblatt during the filming of Closer.
Most users place the Kodak Telecine Calibration System right after the telecine in the workflow, said Dr. Maryann M. Mendel, business development manager with Kodak Entertainment Imaging, allowing them to apply look-up tables to get a "technically correct" transfer.
The Look Management System, a node-based tool for emulating film processes, has DP, lab and post elements and runs on a regular PC. It will come to market with Kodak’s 4:4:4 calibration software. A DP using the system would send a "recipe" and image file to the lab, where the proper look would be recreated as a visual reference for matching dailies. This facilitates the colorist, color timer and DP working together to co-develop the look.
Viewing Thumbnails
FilmLight heads for NAB hoping that BaseLight 2 and TrueLight will have huge impacts. BaseLight, with improved architecture, has been expanded with a tracker and gallery for viewing thumbnails. The goal is to make the DI process easier by refining workflow between the BaseLight and the Northlight, said product manager David Stroud. BaseLight was used for the grading of Cold Mountain at FrameStore CFC, which has eight units, according to Stroud. BaseLight 2 will cost about $109,000. FilmLight will also show Speed Effects, a way of getting very high-bandwidth images and processing performance out of a number of commodity PCs.
Although the Spirit 4K is by far the most expensive film scanner on the market, Thomson’s Grass Valley Group has already sold two of them to Warner Bros. and one each to Laser Pacific and Technicolor specifically for digital intermediate work. The scanner can output 2K frames at 30 fps and 4K frames at 7.5 fps, but the receiving technology cannot handle that yet. It depends greatly on CPU and memory, but an SGI Tezro can be expected to yield 2K at 24 fps and 4K at about 6 fps.
The NAB launch of the DataCine — even more expensive than the Spirit 4K — brings general telecine functionality that will allow GVG to address other post markets, particularly commercials. The spatial processor is worth a long look.
The Specter FS was seen at IBC, but will sport new functionality and productivity enhancements at NAB. All of GVG’s products work on a SAN, eliminating many data-transfer problems and saving storage capacity, says Rainer Knebel, marketing manager, film imaging products. The company also offers an API allowing third-party access to data and EDL exchange.
One hot new product will be Bones, a software tool running in Linux on a PC that gives the user a framework for adding applications. These could be Shout or perhaps the Phantom Transfer Engine, but ask about Shriek, a software spatial processor due to appear after NAB. "If you work on Specter (up to 2K), you can post a CDL to Bones and render it in software up to 4K or 6K," says Knebel.
The only NAB certainties from Pandora are an entry-level real-time HD color-corrector in the $50,000 bracket and a cut-down version of the Evolution controller. The big story concerns Pandora’s Color Tube technology, which it found was compatible with Kodak, Arri and FilmLight. "It was funny that everybody came up with it at the same time," says CTO Steve Brett. "What we’ve done is improve our tool set to analyze the effect and build a color cube in our own hardware. Just feed a test signal through the cube (a series of color tiles) and measure the transformation."
Nucoda started life with a timeline-based product with peripheral digital film applications and has grown incrementally from workflow tools into elements of grading (through Data Conform and Film Master). At NAB it will be moving into the HD realm, with HD I/O and conform as well as 2K. Also shown will be real-time saturation and contrast at 2K, automated dust-busting, and integrated render-farm capability. Nucoda’s timeline and process can be applied to an entire network so the assets do not need to be moved onto a workstation when work is done.
Having accelerated its film recording capability from 22 seconds per frame to just one second over the past five years, Celco will take another step forward with a new color-management system capable of emulating the look of any Kodak or Fuji film stock without using filters, while providing LUT generation for chains of monitors.
The Fury will record to negative stock at 1 fps and to intermediate stock at 1.2 fps. The comparative performance of the $200,000 Firestorm is 2.5 and 6 seconds. Both have a new GUI which offers all the functionality of Celco’s Command line interface, plus control of new sharpening and grain-removal tools and the color-management system.
"The Fury has a built-in touch screen, so you can access a lot of the GUI controls, but with Firestorm you have to do everything from the host computer. One of the things we’ve done is to use the film recorder like a cinematography function. We can now emulate the look of camera negative, and that is the biggest part of what we have been working on with 3D color space. Try to bring down the blue in the past and it would affect the entire range due to crosstalk, but we give users the ability to learn something completely new," said International Marketing Manager Jim Darby.
"You can shoot a movie out to negative on Fury in one and a half days, so you could shoot out seven or eight more negs very quickly and then print from them. You would skip going to IP, to IN and then release print. This is a new thing — exciting, because you would still have your safety copies," he added.
With its $400,000 machine able to shoot onto negative or intermediate stock so quickly, Celco can argue that the old disadvantages it suffered against laser recorders have gone.
Celco is a boutique outfit built around utilization of the military display components it makes in New Jersey. In California it adapts that technology for film recording control over the CRT (spot size, resolution, etc). Darby thinks the scanning market is dangerously overpopulated compared to Celco’s battle with Arri.
On the issue of LUTs and Kodak and Arri trying to license sets of looks, Darby sides with Pandora’s open house view. Celco, like FilmLight with TrueLight, has in mind hundreds of artists working on one project, with as many different monitors demanding precise calibration to ensure that no work is rejected.
Having placed its first beta machine with Efilm, Arri will go to NAB armed with quality feedback about the Arriscan, which is expected to perform at 1 fps at 2K resolution and four seconds per frame at 4K. Trials with an EBU test film have suggested that the Arriscan is, like the NorthLight, fully capable of producing a 6K scan. Arri partners Discreet, Quantel, Nucoda, Iridas and Barco will show preview look-up tables at NAB, according to Digital Systems Marketing Manager Stefan Kramper.
Questions You’ll Want the Answers to This Year
Will IBM’s GPFS technology be the fastest way to support multiple concurrent users?
What are the differences between CRT and laser-based recorders?
Are CMOS sensors the answer to next-generation requirements?
Which scanners are too slow to service the demands of the DI market?
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