Colour Management

[Chris Kenny]

There are more unknown variables when you go back to film, is the "soup" fresh or stale. Are they hitting LAD Aims. It's definitely not WYSIWYG.

Nor with DTP, where there are variations in ink, paper stock, the performance of specific printers/presses, etc. and ultimately the only proof is, well... the proof. If you're lucky. Yet, the industry manages.

In the film and high-end video production business, in contrast, we have people telling us that color grading is an arcane art which can only be practiced by high priests in tall towers with a quarter million dollars worth of equipment, up to and including a $30K set of knobs to twiddle. Anyone from the DTP world, who has been doing color-accurate work for years with commodity hardware and software, knows that this is complete nonsense. The DTP solutions aren't perfect, but they're good enough.

There are many people who have been in the film or high-end video production industry a long time, and have the luxury of working on big-budget stuff with the best equipment money can buy. Some of these folks seem to have developed the notion that it's not possible to make anything worthwhile with any lesser equipment. You won't see this stated outright often, because when stated outright it's obviously nuts, but it's implicit in a lot of what gets said in some other forums. Not just about color, but about lenses, tripods, audio.... It's something to watch out for.

[GlennChan]

For big-budget work, some of the high-end systems can make a lot of sense. All the other kit costs so much that it makes sense to pay a lot to get a little faster. As well, they also have to keep the clients happy; having to wait on rendering and whatnot is not impressive. And for commercial clients, they sort of want to spend as much as possible to get the best quality. So that's why there is a market for high-end kit.

2- At the lower end of the scale, I certainly think that there is a market for a good desktop color grading program... Final Touch sort of demonstrates this. FT does have its problems though... the main ones being instability, and its poor workflow. Image quality (masking/vignettes/windows look bad) and RT performance also aren't quite up to par IMO.

However, these problems can definitely be solved. Instability, workflow, and image quality can all be solved. And 32-bit FP math can improve image quality somewhat compared to hardware-based systems like a Da Vinci 2K, if you make the leap to linear light processing.

The only shortcoming that may or may not be solved is performance. GPU acceleration might solve this. In existing systems, Final Touch and Scratch (and Lustre) arguably don't have that great performance compared to hardware-based color correctors. Although if you look at Discreet FFI systems (for VFX work), their move to GPU acceleration from SGI shows that GPU acceleration can work very well (although their systems are Linux-based). As well, SGO Mistika (an online system) runs on commodity gaming video cards (it doesn't even need a Quadro workstation card) and runs circles around FCP. But anyways, it should be possible for a really good desktop grading app to exist.

[Chris Kenny]

GPU acceleration will definitely solve the performance issues. The only question is whether it'll do it this year, or two years from now. (I can't imagine it'll take any longer than that.)

And as Motion, Aperture, and a bunch of OS X technologies (Core Image, Core Animation, Quartz 2D Extreme, etc.) show, Apple right on top of GPU acceleration. Final Cut Pro is lagging behind, because it predates the rise of this technology, but it's inevitable that will will join the party eventually. I'd give better than 50% odds we'll see FCP with a seriously overhauled GPU-accellerated engine at NAB, though whether it'll actually be shipping then or only later I won't try to predict.

[Lucas Wilson]

GPU acceleration will definitely solve the performance issues. The only question is whether it'll do it this year, or two years from now. (I can't imagine it'll take any longer than that.)

Not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but SCRATCH can do several layers of realtime grading on 2K images with 32-bit float resolution in realtime... today. Are there things that force a drop below RT? Absolutely... blurs, soft-edge keys, etc. That will only get better, but multi-layers of realtime CC at high resolutions with high bit-depths are here now.

... In the film and high-end video production business, in contrast, we have people telling us that color grading is an arcane art which can only be practiced by high priests in tall towers with a quarter million dollars worth of equipment, up to and including a $30K set of knobs to twiddle. Anyone from the DTP world, who has been doing color-accurate work for years with commodity hardware and software, knows that this is complete nonsense.

Do a grade on a 2048x1556 image in Photoshop.

Now... take 24 of those in a second, and grade all of those.
Now... take several seconds of that shot. It's in the sun. For 5 seconds in the middle of the shot, the sun obscures focus. Make that go away.
Now... there are 15 different pieces of that same scene that were shot on 5 different days with different ambient lighting conditions. Make all of those look like they came from the same 5 minutes.
Now... take those 15 scenes, and make them work in context with the other 200 scenes from the movie.

It doesn't take high priests in tall towers. But is a very, very different discipline. I wouldn't take a colorist and put him/her in the role of an art director at Saatchi, and I wouldn't take the art director and stick them at Company3 grading for Michael Mann.

Maybe it's a lot of the same technical basis, but it's a completely different skill.

[Lucas Wilson]

... But, if RSR or Truelight decide to come out with something mere mortals can afford, I'd be thrilled. ...

Trevor... have you talked to RSR about pricing? They are much more reasonable than you might be thinking.

Truelight - very, very expensive. RSR... very different pricing scheme.

Lucas
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ASSIMILATE, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Chris Kenny]

Not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but SCRATCH can do several layers of realtime grading on 2K images with 32-bit float resolution in realtime... today. Are there things that force a drop below RT? Absolutely... blurs, soft-edge keys, etc. That will only get better, but multi-layers of realtime CC at high resolutions with high bit-depths are here now.

Yeah, you guys seem to have a great system. And I'd assume a company with products and pricing as aggressive as yours (and with representatives posting thin this forum) isn't going to be caught unawares by what commodity technology is enabling.

It doesn't take high priests in tall towers. But is a very, very different discipline. I wouldn't take a colorist and put him/her in the role of an art director at Saatchi, and I wouldn't take the art director and stick them at Company3 grading for Michael Mann.

Maybe it's a lot of the same technical basis, but it's a completely different skill.

Sure. I'm not saying it's the same skill. Just that it's a learnable skill, not an arcane art, and also fundamentally something that can be done at an acceptable level with fairly low-cost software and hardware these days (at least, there's no technical barrier), and with even lower cost hardware in a few years.

[Rob Lohman]

Scratch was doing 2K playback in our IBC booth last year. It's a great system!

[Lucas Wilson]

Yeah, you guys seem to have a great system. And I'd assume a company with products and pricing as aggressive as yours (and with representatives posting thin this forum) isn't going to be caught unawares by what commodity technology is enabling.

Nope... we're pretty much constantly aware of it.

Sure. I'm not saying it's the same skill. Just that it's a learnable skill, not an arcane art, and also fundamentally something that can be done at an acceptable level with fairly low-cost software and hardware these days (at least, there's no technical barrier), and with even lower cost hardware in a few years.

Completely agreed. :)

[P Andersson]

I really appreciate the thoughts on color in this thread. Coming from photography, I know the benefits of ICC, it is like the "babelfish" of color. Then TIFF Adobe RGB that acts like the reference base that everybody all over the planet can transform into whatever file format and color profile they want.

Is there at present, a general use file format within digital film/video that irrespective of fps or resolution acts like this TIFF Adobe RGB. It would show up on my monitor looking decent, and would then look similarly decent on another guys monitor if he too has a calibrated monitor, no matter what NLE or operating system was used, and this file containing more color than most other uses, could then be transformed into any other standard for whatever output purpose might be needed.

The thread has talked about that this doesn't really exist yet, so this post is simply trying to establish what would be the best solution "for today" to say move through a couple of NLE's, monitors, operating systems and color graders as smoothly as possible.

[Thomas Mathai]

I see it as that it's easy to get 90% (bad to good) done with any software, the last 10% (good to great) is always the hardest.

I think that's how those people who are used to using the higher end tools see it too. They are used to tools that give them a lot of control, very fast, and they pay for that readily since their deadlines are always fast approaching.

Adobe and Apple have an idea what the high end users want, but at the same time they can impliment only so much at a time.

I think that's why they are making it easier and easier for 3rd parties to fill in the gaps. Any of you checked out Conduit from DVGarage or Colorista from Red Giant Software?

Anything is learnable, it's up to the individual to decide if it's a skill they want to pursue.

A filmmaker I know used Company 3 for color correcting his spec commercial. He said even as they were setting up, with just a few touches, the colorist was already getting closer to the look he wanted. He said he could have done it himself in FCP, but it would have taken him much longer, and he doesn't think it would have been as polished.