Colour Management

[Chris Kenny]

I can't really imagine why an ICC profile system wouldn't be good enough even to go to film, assuming the monitor has the appropriate physical characteristics. ICC is used to go from RGB monitors to CMYK printers in the DTP world. That requires figuring out how to reproduce colors using different primaries, and if you've ever seen a lab plot of the color space that can actually be reproduced by a printer, it's usually, well, somewhat bizarre. Going from a monitor to film should be simpler than this.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

REALLY COOL new color management tools to be debuted at NAB from Filmlight (makers of Truelight) - and keep your eye on Rising Sun Research ...

 

[Joe Carney]

REALLY COOL new color management tools to be debuted at NAB from Filmlight (makers of Truelight) - and keep your eye on Rising Sun Research ...

I would like to see, really cool and affordable color management tools to debut at NAB.

 

[Thomas Mathai]

I can't really imagine why an ICC profile system wouldn't be good enough even to go to film, assuming the monitor has the appropriate physical characteristics. ICC is used to go from RGB monitors to CMYK printers in the DTP world. That requires figuring out how to reproduce colors using different primaries, and if you've ever seen a lab plot of the color space that can actually be reproduced by a printer, it's usually, well, somewhat bizarre. Going from a monitor to film should be simpler than this.

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.

 

[Trevor Meier]

ICC might be overkill (except when calibrating to film stock)... I'd be happy with whatever as long as it's:

a) reasonably accurate
b) affordable

ICC accomplishes both, and the bugs have been worked out...

But, if RSR or Truelight decide to come out with something mere mortals can afford, I'd be thrilled. I doubt it though - in the DI world where Scratch can come in at $30K+ as the value leader (which it is... which is exactly my point...) ... I doubt they will release something at an affordable price point for fear of compromising the huge investment they've made in R&D.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

The only remaining barrier will be talent

The only remaining barrier will be talent

I think Chris nailed the crux of the biscuit with his analogy to desktop publishing and the concept of barriers being broken from the bottom up. The devotion to established color management strategies might persist in the high end of the market but beyond that forget it. IMHO tape to tape color correction will go the way of the dodo.

Properly set up rooms operated by talented specialists for top quality audio mixing and color grading will still have a place anytime there is a bit of budget and/or quick turnarounds. The real sea change here is that with the maturation of the commodity NLEs (particularly Final Cut) you'll get the ability to get very close to the same finish quality.

We need robust file formats that support higher bit depths and are easily interchangeable. The RedOne > RedCine data centric approach may not be fully supported on day one but given time I expect it to be a very smooth ride into NLEs that are ever more fully featured.

For my part I have painted the walls 18% gray, added some medium gray acoustical panels, spent a little coin on some near field optimized speakers for audio mixing and am ordering an eCinema DCM23 monitor for color grading. I may not be able to match the talent of the best post houses in LA or NY but if Final Cut Studio 6 includes a 10 bit color correction engine...

... and the walls came down, all the way to...

 

[Trevor Meier]

BTW I'm not trying to devalue what Truelight and RSR do. They've got great science and excellent products. What they offer (specific calibration of environments to lab outputs) is a necessary part of high-end DI workflows.

But I'm not high-end. I just want to be able to see the image in a good approximation of what will be seen by my audience. That isn't the case right now. The technology exists to do it accurately and affordably. So here's hoping someone will do with workflow what Red's doing with camera's and break the artificial barrier that exists at the moment...

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Color me affordable

Color me affordable

Trevor - agreed, there are some great tools but they are pricey. Right now the desktop / low budget tools for color grading (and profiling devices in the post production chain) for matching to final output characteristics are crude by comparison to what the serious specialty vendors offer.

Having been involved in the DTP revolution I see many parallels here. I think in the near future we will see big improvements in the "desktop" color grading applications. Top talent will still do the best work but self taught colorists, (especially those with Photoshop and/or video engineering backgrounds) with proper monitors in properly set up rooms should be able to turn out beautiful images. I would even go so far as to postulate an expansion in the art form, though along the way we will likely be subjected to some awful dreck. (No pain, no gain.)

Now, how about a decent desktop scope package - the specialty boxes from Tektronix and the like are ridiculously expensive. Final Cut 5 improved their scopes a bit and Scopebox has gotten some good reviews but how about killer scopes in Final Cut 6 - please Steve, pleeeeease...

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

if Final Cut Studio 6 includes a 10 bit color correction engine...

expect a 32 bit float color engine (on the GPU) but a TON of new bugs that will take 4 or months or so to settle down ...

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Now, how about a decent desktop scope package - the specialty boxes from Tektronix and the like are ridiculously expensive. Final Cut 5 improved their scopes a bit and Scopebox has gotten some good reviews but how about killer scopes in Final Cut 6 - please Steve, pleeeeease...

Steve is busy making phones & ipods.

If by killer you mean 100% accurate with amazing detail ... you need to accept that "Killer scopes" are simply not possible without hardware at this time.

OmniTek is the most KILLER. Yes, expensive. But KILLER!

Sometimes you gotta pay to play.

 

[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
-----
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.