At Cine Gear Expo 2022, Colorfront shows Express Dailies 2022, ready to adapt to new set-to-post workflows with the ACES Metadata File that improves integrity in ACES viewing pipelines.
Colorfront is at Cine Gear Expo 2022, running 9 to 12 June, with software updates and new workflows to show. These include Colorfront Express Dailies 2022, with new functionality supported by fast processing and collaborative features, allowing it to adapt to new set-to-post workflows. Also on show is Colorfront Streaming Server Mini, which live-streams secure, reference-quality pictures/audio with sub-second latency for remote collaborative review.
Shipping in mid-2022, Express Dailies 2022 will be shown running on the new Mac Studio M1 Ultra workstation, processing SDR/HDR footage simultaneously to Apple Pro Display XDR monitors. Following engineering collaborations with Apple, Express Dailies 2022 can now take advantage of the new Mac Studio’s extreme high performance for accelerated acquisition, dailies and finishing tasks.
Express Dailies 2022 also supports the most recent digital cinematography camera formats, such as ARRI Alexa 35 4.6K with ARRI Reveal colour science, ARRI Textures and 17-stops of dynamic range, plus Red V-Raptor 8K VV, Sony Venice 2 8.6K and Blackmagic Design 12K RAW.
ACES Metadata File
Colorfront has upgraded the colour management capabilities of Express Dailies 2022 with full support for ACES 1.3, the latest Academy Color Encoding System. ACES 1.3 includes ACES Metadata File (AMF), which is designed to increase flexibility when implementing ACES viewing pipelines.
AMF – a sidecar XML file carrying the metadata instructions – supports the exchange of accurate, clip-level metadata between on-set, dailies and finishing processes. It contains a detailed pipeline description with all of the various input (IDT), output (ODT) and look-modification (LMT) transforms that need to be applied to a clip to recreate the creative intent, plus the working colour space and the version of ACES being used. The transport of AMFs via Express Dailies 2022 maintains consistent end-to-end colour appearance, and secures an unambiguous archive of the creative intent.
Express Dailies 2022 on board a DIT cart.
Bruno Munger, Colorfront’s Director of Business Development notes that ACES AMF makes applying colour pipeline and colour decisions across multiple applications, on multiple shots from different cameras, a much more precise operation. “Having ACES AMF within Express Dailies 2022 gives users a way to manage accurate colour communication between on-set and dailies, through to editorial, VFX and post-production mastering, and extends the capabilities of Express Dailies 2022 within new, highly-efficient workflows.”
Plug-in for DaVinci Resolve, Pomfort Round-trip
Developments with Pomfort and Blackmagic Design have also improved end-to-end colour operations. In an on-going collaboration between Colorfront and Pomfort a round-trip-workflow supporting Colorfront Engine has been implemented in Pomfort's Livegrade Studio on-set colour grading system, to allow the exchange of clip-level ACES AMF metadata and colour descriptions in ACES viewing pipelines.
Also, after several months of beta-testing, Colorfront is showing a new Colorfront Engine Plug-in for Blackmagic Design Davinci Resolve NLE and post-production system. The new plug-in supports the ACES AMF workflow, as well as the application of Colorfront Engine parametric looks and transforms during post-production operations, which ensures perceptually matching simultaneous SDR/HDR deliverables.
LUA scripting in DaVinci Resolve can be used to apply looks to timelines containing multiple shots.
Colorfront Engine’s Perceptual Processing, when used with the included Academy Reference Gamut Compression algorithm, will now help users to correctly handle ‘blue fringe’ problems resulting from extremely bright or saturated objects, such as LED lights.
Josh Baca, Technology Partner at ArsenalFX Color post studio in Santa Monica said, “ArsenalFX Color works with Colorfront on many projects, using Colorfront Engine in Express Dailies and Transkoder to manage our look-creation and colour pipeline requirements -- from on-set to editorial and VFX. With their support for AMF in the ACES workflow, and the Colorfront Engine plug-in for DaVinci Resolve, all teams involved in a project can maintain the integrity of the creative artistic vision during all steps of capture through to final process.”
Also on show at Cine Gear Expo, will be Colorfront Streaming Server Mini, a software-only product for Mac/PC workstations, that digital artists can use to securely encode and live-stream, frame and colour-accurate, reference-quality work-in-progress over the public internet to multiple production stakeholders, wherever they are around the world. colorfront.com
