COLORFRONT FOCUSES ON SET-TO-SCREEN COLOR FIDELITY AND 8K WORKFLOWS AT CINE GEAR EXPO 2019

Colorfront (www.colorfront.com), the Academy, Emmy and HPA Award-winning developer of high-performance, on-set dailies and transcoding systems for motion pictures, broadcast, OTT and commercials, is focusing on faithful color management from capture to delivery, plus fast/efficient 8K workflows, at this year’s Cine Gear Expo, which takes place at Paramount Studios from May 30th to June 2nd 2019.

At the show, Colorfront will highlight how its products provide the rockbed of color-accurate SDR/HDR pipelines from set-to-screen, via regular demonstrations at its booth (#S306) and also during a special, one-hour premier seminar and panel discussion at the Sherry Lansing Theater, Paramount Studios, on May 31st. Additionally, Colorfront is showcasing real-time 8K workflow, in collaboration with RED Digital Cinema, during an open house event at RED Studios on May 30th.

Colorfront’s 4K HDR Color Management Demonstrations (Booth #S306): Colorfront will demonstrate how – considering today’s wide choice of digital cameras, plus multitude of SDR/HDR delivery options – it solves the immense challenge of maintaining the ‘creative look’ from capture to finish through to final deliveries.

Key to this solution lies in Colorfront Engine™, the state-of-the-art perceptual color-processing pipeline, which features in Colorfront’s On-Set Dailies/Express Dailies and Transkoder products. Colorfront Engine utilizes knowledge of how the human visual system works to faithfully reproduce images on different displays in different viewing conditions.

Essentially, Colorfront Engine can map the many and varied input formats – including graded (display-referred) as well as camera original (scene-referred) images – to a wide range of SDR/HDR output formats at user-definable brightness levels and gamuts, all while maintaining the original creative intent.

Cine Gear Expo visitors can see the latest version of Colorfront Express Dailies working in tandem with AJA FS-HDR and Pomfort LiveGrade Pro, revealing how CDL live grading used within Colorfront Engine can enable accurate SDR/HDR previews at any nit level as part of an accurate, color managed workflow from on-set, through dailies, into post-production, and beyond.

Colorfront Engine’s color pipeline was used successfully during principal photography in Spain and Hungary on Paramount Pictures’ Terminator: Dark Fate (dir. Tim Miller, DP Ken Seng), one of the first movies to shoot using ARRI Alexa LF, and also on Top Gun: Maverick (dir: Joseph Kosinski, DP Claudio Miranda ASC) one of the first movies to shoot with the Sony Venice full frame camera.

Colorfront Seminar: ‘Creative Look Management – From Capture To Delivery’: Colorfront’s Academy-Award winning CTO Bill Feightner will host a panel of industry experts to discuss ‘Creative Look Management: From Capture to Delivery’ – a Cine Gear Expos Premier Seminar – on Friday, May 31st from 7-to-8pm, at the Sherry Lansing Theater.

The seminar will address the ease of implementing an end-to-end workflow that supports accurately-matched SDR/HDR previews from on-set through dailies, editorial, VFX, finishing and deliverables, utilizing Colorfront Engine and its human perceptual processing model.

The seminar will also reveal how, via the newly-announced Colorfront Engine OpenFX plug-ins, Colorfront products can be combined with color grading systems such as DaVinci Resolve by Blackmagic Design, plus VFX systems such as The Foundry’s Nuke, in a fully-integrated color workflow. This enables creative looks and CDL grades to pass into the post-production pipeline with crucial metadata references about where they are to be applied and viewed at any nit level.

The panel of special guests – including Dane Brehm, production technologist at Cintegral, Larry Field, supervising colorist at Arsenal, Dylan Damian, director of dailies operations at Light Iron and Joachim Zell, VP technology at EFILM – will discuss the challenges of current LUT-based workflows and successful solutions for color-managed workflows in motion picture and TV productions.

Colorfront Goes 8K HDR at RED Studios, Hollywood: With the arrival of 8K TV sets, Colorfront is actively working with several companies around the world that are originating 8K HDR content. Teaming-up with RED, Colorfront will demonstrate how 8K HDR is now perfectly accessible to an even wider range of content creators.

On Thursday, May 30th, from 8-to-11pm, at RED Studios’ open house product experience area, Colorfront will show Colorfront Transkoder performing real-time 8K HDR playback of R3D footage on a 75″ Samsung Q900R display. Utilizing NVidia CUDA-accelerated decompression and deBayering of R3D footage, this new system means RED Rocket is no longer needed for real-time 8K HDR processing and playback.