Assimilate’s New SCRATCH 9.1 Offers Groundbreaking Features and Performance for Dailies and Finishing

Increased Productivity Enables Time for Increased Creativity

July 1, 2019 – San Jose, CA – Assimilate today announced the most robust version of its dailies and finishing software to date with SCRATCH 9.1. Known for its stability, speed, and streamlined workflows for tackling complex projects with ease, SCRATCH 9.1 now includes new and extensive groundbreaking-performance features for even greater productivity.

SCRATCH 9.1 Highlights

Dailies: From HBO’s “Big Little Lies 2” to Paramount’s “Yellowstone”, and feature films like “Marwen” and “Hereditary”, DITs worldwide are using SCRATCH as their high-performance dailies platform.

SCRATCH continues to raise the bar on what’s possible in the production process, with access to all the advanced, real-time color, texture and VFX tools used in SCRATCH finishing, allowing onset DITs to reach far beyond basic color. Added features also enable more efficiencies in the dailies tasks and workflows.

New features include:

• Industry-leading integration with Avid –  includes all metadata in the Avid MXF, more than any other software. Additionally, SCRATCH is the only software to include all the source-shot metadata, including genuine Sound TC in Avid MXF, which is crucial for later on in post, for example, for a Pro Tools roundtrip.

• Per-frame metadata on ARRIRAW files, allowing camera departments to pass through camera roll and tilt, lens focus distance metadata items, and more.  Editorial and VFX teams will find per-frame info invaluable later in post.

• Extremely fast playback and rendering is now even faster. 

• Real-time, full-res RED 8K DeBayer on GPU

• Deep set of options to load media, including sizing options, LUTs, and automatic audio-sync, speeding up the organizational process when dealing with large amounts of disparate media.

• LUT cycler, allowing for quick preview and testing of large numbers of looks on footage.

• Preset outputs for PIX, DAX, MediaSilo, COPRA, simplifying the delivery of industry-standard web dailies.

Finishing:  From feature films like “Captain Fantastic”, “Boyhood”, and “Pitch Perfect” to episodics like “Tatort” and “El Recluso”, post-production artists rely on SCRATCH for the versatility, speed, and stability of its color grading and finishing tools.  With an extensive and powerful feature set, SCRATCH can act as a central hub for all finishing needs.

New features include:

• Groundbreaking native Touch controls for grading by clicking and dragging directly on the image.  An intuitive and wholly unique new way to color and manipulate images, an artist can grade the overall image or even control curves and secondaries — all without a panel and directly where the cursor is dragging. 

• Extremely fast playback and rendering is now even faster.

• Real-time, full-res RED 8K DeBayer on GPU

• Redesigned color management system, enabling deep control over how camera specific gamut and gamma spaces are handled and converted, as well as a new color-space conversion plug-in (any color space to any other) that can be applied at any stage of the color/mastering process.

• Vector tool for advanced color remapping using a color grid

• Automatic installation of free Matchbox Shaders, opening SCRATCH up to a wealth of real-time VFX effects, including glows, lens effects, grain add/remove, as well as more advanced creative FX.

• Built-in highlight glow, diffusion, de-noise, and time-warp FX

• Added support for AJA’s Io 4K Plus and KONA 5 SDI output devices using the latest SDKs.

• Among the first to support Apple’s new ProRes RAW compressed-acquisition format, and best-in-class Blackmagic RAW support on both OSX and Windows

• New integrations with After Effects and Nuke extend the SCRATCH 9.1 finishing/VFX pipeline to bring the VFX teams into the client sessions with high-performance round-tripping with VFX:

• Within SCRATCH, now seamlessly send shots to and from Nuke / After Effects, including transparencies and alphas. This opens up SCRATCH to high-end tracking, compositing, 3D models, advanced stabilization, motion graphics and more.  

• Within the VFX pipeline, SCRATCH can act as a central hub for all finishing needs. It provides real-time tools for any format, data management, playback, all color management in a timeline with audio, including to and from After Effects and Nuke.

“A primary goal for us is to quickly respond to the needs of DITs and post artists, whether it’s for more advanced features, new format support, or real-time bug-fixes,” said Mazze Aderhold, SCRATCH product manager at Assimilate. “Every feature introduced in SCRATCH 9.1 is based on feedback we received from our users before and during the Beta cycle. We thoughtfully listen and respond, which has contributed to making SCRATCH 9.1 our most robust software version to date.”

Aderhold added, “We continually hear from the user community how SCRATCH is outperforming competitive software with its operating speed, rendering times, unique and intuitive features, and stability. Users, as well as their clients, are blown away by the powerful tool suite, responsiveness and fluid ease-of-use that SCRATCH continues to offer.”

Price and Availability

Available immediately, SCRATCH 9.1 starts at $89.00 (USD) monthly and $695.00 (USD) annually. Download at https://www.assimilateinc.com/download/.  

The complete user manual and documentation are on the support site at http://www.assimilatesupport.com/akb/Downloads.aspx.

About Assimilate

Assimilate offers SCRATCH dailies and post-production workflows that have proven essential to productivity and creativity in the creation of high-end 2D/3D/VR studio and independent feature films, documentaries, TV episodes, commercials and music videos. SCRATCH is resolution independent, and is first to update support for new formats. Used by DITs and post artists worldwide, SCRATCH is known for its power, stability, speed, groundbreaking and unique feature set, and streamlined workflows for tackling complex projects with ease. Additionally, in SCRATCH VR, Assimilate offers the only professional end-to-end VR workflow and tools for VR360 / 3D and VR180 / 3D, including stitching, Ambisonic sound, and live streaming. Learn more at www.assimilateinc.com.