Welcome to the Color Timer podcast.
I am your host, Vincent Taylor.
This is the podcast where we speak to professionals
who work with color.
Today, I am speaking to Mr. Steve Shaw.
He is CEO of a company called Light Illusion,
although you'll see he gets a
bit shy when I call him CEO.
He's a fascinating fellow and he deals,
and how do I water this down
into a couple of little bite-sized sentances?
But basically, very, very basically,
they deal with color management, color calibration,
that whole world of making sure
that you trust what you're looking at.
But it's a great conversation, so let's go.
Take your seats because the
hourglass is about to turn.
We are entering the world of the micro podcast.
Explore the craft, creativity, and
science of professionals
who use color to tell stories.
Welcome to The Color Timer with Vincent Taylor.
[MUSIC]
Steve, hi, thank you for joining me.
Pleasure, mate, pleasure.
Yeah, good to see you.
I stumbled onto your work because
I keep seeing posts on LinkedIn and
instantly intrigued by
what you're working on and so
then became a little bit quietly obsessed.
You're classified as a
specialist in critical color management.
Well, when I started to do some research, you come
from a heck of a background,
like you've worn a lot of hats.
And I'd love to go through some stepping stones as
to how you got to where you are
now.
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't classify myself as being
the specialist in color stuff.
I've ended up doing color and I
happen to have guys that work with us
that are very much specialists in color.
Cuz that's kind of where we've ended up.
But that was certainly not
where things started out.
I've been in the film and TV
industry for more years than I care t--
yes, there you go, yeah, for the timer.
Otherwise, I just waffled on forever.
Yeah, no, I'm 59, give or take now.
And I started in this industry when I was 16.
Wait, wait, wait.
You're 59 years old, you're looking good, mate.
You're looking good.
Yeah, that's lack of stress.
Yeah.
I just happened to grow up in a town where at that
time, a young and upcoming company
was starting out doing the very early days of
digital TV, which was Quantel.
And I ended up basically getting a job at the age
of 16 with them rather than going to
college and university, which was the plan.
I mean, at that time, companies
actually were quite successful.
Keen to get hold of people younger so they could
kind of train them in this kind of new
concept of digital imaging that really wasn't being
taught because it didn't exist in college
universities and that.
And basically went in as an electronics engineer
and ended up doing that kind of side of things
for some considerable time.
I ended up in Los Angeles, well,
actually New York first, and then L.A.
in the very early days of kind of things that were
called Harry and Encore and what have
you, the Paint Box and that as an engineer doing
installations, doing service work, whatever.
So got into it very much from the hands on
electronic side of things.
And from there, it just kind of
that was it for quite some years.
And then I decided when we started getting into the
kind of greater level of image manipulation,
which was in my view was film.
So we got into digital film through
the development of Domino with Quantel.
And that side of it was at that time pretty
interesting because it was a whole new game,
scanning film, digitizing it, doing the visual
effects, putting your class of film
and cutting it back into the original negative.
And I ended up setting up a
facility or a few facilities in Soho.
Many White Coats was the first one
doing pretty much that kind of work.
- Such a great name for a company.
- Yeah, we did a lot of work on films like
Elizabeth, Lost in Space,
Deep Blue Sea, things like that.
And it was those early days, we were physically
handling camera, original negative, scanning it,
doing the digital effects
work, putting it back to film.
And it was being spliced in and
then the whole chain was still film.
I left there, to be fair, I just got fed up working
in dark rooms 24 seven for two years.
And I actually joined, yeah, I joined Cinetel as
technical director on the telecine side.
But it was at the end of that era.
And if I'm truthful,
I didn't look into what was happening with the
company and the whole film industry.
I should have known because obviously I was already
working with digital cameras at that time.
And I ended up in Rome at Trinity to Film Studios
at the beginning of what is now just true digital
cinematography and digital post-production in the
film side, in the
resolutions that we now talk about
as 3k, 4k, what have you nowadays. And I was out
there on and off for a good 18 months and started
travelling again to act as a consultant in the same
business but all around the world.
And I ended up again starting another post house
called Axis Post in Shepparton Studios with another
partner company which was Axis Films and carried on
doing that side of it. But at the same time
doing this consultancy work and bouncing around all
over them and I've worked on and off in
pretty much everywhere Africa, Japan, China, Hong
Kong, you name it I've probably been there.
That's amazing. And while I was doing that we
basically started, well I started developing a
very simple, what was effectively a spreadsheet
with VBS scripting and that to do color
manipulation. And we were using it just back in the
days of the Viper camera and we were working
on a film, one of the Highlander films which was
shot with Viper, another film that was called
Silence Becomes You which was the very first film
ever shot entirely digital that wasn't video.
It was all captured with what were called S2 disc
recorders in pure digital imagery non-video.
And I did a lot of work on the color science of
that using this kind of VBS script,
Excel spreadsheet stuff that I'd been playing with
for my own application. And people started
to hear about it and then started to ask if they
could get their hands onto it. So I ended up
selling it for not a lot but just as something to
do. And effectively that's grown into what we do
today as Light Illusion. So now you are the CEO of
Light Illusion and I had... Wow, come on.
I love titles, actually I don't. And I had a look
at the website and the home page is filled with
graphs and numbers and it's like it looks awesome.
And it's such a great kind of overview
of what you guys do in just one picture, with Light
Illusion and what you guys are doing at a
very base level. Who is it for? I mean, it's not
for the people necessary that we intended it.
I mean, originally it was always... We were in the
professional world. I mean, everybody that works
with us. And I mean, Light Illusion is just a front
company. There are no real employees other
than myself and my wife who is the company
secretary, just for legal purposes, the two of us.
And the people we work with are effectively
freelance associates, consultants, whatever
you want to call them. But we've been working
together for many years on different aspects
of the product. And it goes back to people that
you may recognize. I mean, Walter Valpatto,
who's a well-known colorist in LA. Well, when I was
working in Cinicito in Rome,
he was actually the engineer for Quantel at the
time. He was their support engineer. And because
I was at Cinicito with a guy called David Bush, who
was well-known for using Quantel kit over the
years, Quantel sent us the early days of the IQ
system when they didn't understand what they
were going to do with it. So Walter would come in
and babysit this hardware that just turned up,
that we were playing with. And we ended up
consulting with Quantel to develop the color
side of IQ and turn it into the system it became.
So I ended up doing a lot of freelance consultancy
work back with Quantel at that time. And Walter was
very much involved with us because he was
there in Rome. So he would come into Cinicito
because he hadn't anything else to do.
And one of the very early IQ installations for
color work was at Fotokem in LA. And I went out
there because I kind of knew it inside out because
of the work I'd been doing in the development of
it as kind of a trainee colorist as in to train
them up. And we did a film that was called
America Heart and Soul, which is kind of a
documentary on different aspects of American
life. And there was lots of different footage shot
in different ways. And we edited it together and
graded it all through the IQ. And I was the
colorist on it because it was the first real
kind of project that Fotokem put through. But I
couldn't finish the project off. So I arranged
for Walter to come over as a standing colorist to
take over while I couldn't be there. And basically
that's how he got his start as a colorist in LA.
And Fotokem took him on full time at the end of
the project. And obviously he's become this very,
very, very successful colorist on the back of that.
And he's done brilliantly well. But he was actively
involved in the development of the early
days of what is now ColourSpace was then Light
Space. So, you know, we've had a whole host of
different people involved in the products over the
years. And many of them, you know, we are still in
touch with. I'm amazed to hear backstories of where
people got their starts and how they have kind of
ended up where they are. I mean, Walter's amazing.
He turned that into his own thing and he's ended
up being very good at it. But again, like me, he
was an engineer. Not a creative initially,
but obviously he's turned out to be able to merge
those two together in a very impressive way.
And that's kind of where I come from. You know, I'm
an engineer, but I ended up doing visual effects
for real. And I've supervised visual effects on
set. I've done the color grading. I've done
visual effects work for real. So, you know, we've
done all of that. And all of that has helped
develop ColourSpace. And going back to your
question, that was kind of where originally it
was intended, that it would be used by
professionals for color management. Both, you know,
calibration of displays came a little later.
Initially, it was more about color management
for pipelines, for workflow from cameras.
through into the editing and
grading side of it and the calibration.
side kind of has been added onto that later. Just
one of the reasons we completely rewrote
the program from Light Space to ColourSpace so
that we could effectively invert it because
the calibration has become a bigger part of the
product rather than the color management
per se. But in doing that, it's ended up being used
in places we never thought of. We sell
into medical because calibration for medical
displays is huge, something called DICOM.
Home cinema users, we sell an extraordinary amount
of software to home cinema users that
want to have their...
home cinema.
mirroring the environment and that includes the
color and all the rest of it that you
get in grading houses. So the
application has grown astronomically.
And then with ColourSpace, I mean I know it's
always so difficult to squeeze, and I
knew this was going to be hard with you anyway
because there's so many things I want to talk
about, but if we focus on ColourSpace for a
second, someone comes to you, say they've
got a home cinema or maybe they're a studio and
they go, "Alright, we want to get this
right." So where do they start in working with you?
Realistically, it comes down to what level of
calibration accuracy they're aiming for
and realistically what their budget is. You know,
the software is one part of it, but
the hardware associated with that can be an even
bigger part in cost terms. And at the
end of the day, the measurement devices that you're
using dictate the level of accuracy
you can attain no matter what software you use. We
will obviously say that our software
is the best on the planet for doing calibration and
color workflows and things, but it is
always limited by the ability of the devices that
you're using. That includes the display,
probes and to be fair, the actual color pipeline.
You'll be surprised how many times there are
distortions put into it just through having a
color pipeline that just isn't configured
correctly. But that's the kind of thing that we can
fix. And the level of fixing is down
to the end user and what they are trying to attain
and how much money they actually want
to spend at the end of the day.
I've got my list of questions here. I see my sand
timer. I'm going, "Shh, what do I
do?" But okay, here's a selfish one for me. With
this revolution of remote colour grading,
I'm constantly dealing with clients who are, you
know, they're not in my suite and they're
looking at on something else. I'd love to hear your
thoughts about how do you tackle
something like that when you can't always manage
what people are looking at things on?
Yeah, realistically, it's almost an impossible
question because unless you have hands-on
with whatever display devices they're using, it's
impossible to guess what they are, how
they're set up, what their colorability really is.
I mean, we have clients that will
send a probe, just a small one just to get at least
better. So something like a Spyder
X2 or an i1-D3 or something like that that's not
overly expensive. But they're still good.
They're capable of reasonably good color accuracy
if they're managed correctly. So
they'll send that to the client with one of our
software licenses that is the low-end
side of it because you can remote access to it. So
the post house that's got our full
ColourSpace, XPT or whatever, they can actually
control this other version of it at the client's
location with a probe and they can measure the
display remotely. That measurement data
comes back to the post house in ColourSpace. They
can actually then generate an offset
LUT within ColourSpace and just burn that into the
imagery before they send it to the
client. They don't have to calibrate their display,
they just have to know what the display
is like, what its parameters are. In doing that,
you can build a lookup table and burn
it into the footage before you send it. That's very
clever. That's quite common, common approach
nowadays. And obviously you're finding this is...
Well, no, it's not obvious, but I'm assuming
this is much more common now, right? Because so
many more people are doing remote work.
Yeah, I mean, if people are doing remote work where
they really are colluding on a project,
that needs to be handled differently because they
all need to know that the monitors that
they're using are properly calibrated and are of a
consistent level of capability. So
in those situations, everybody involved
realistically has got to be
calibrating their displays.
Otherwise, there's too many variables to go wrong.
Yeah, that's exactly it. And of course, my sand
time has run out, but as always, I'm
going to cheat and just, I'm going to throw one
more. And again, it's a selfish question.
Folks who have listened to my podcast have probably
already gathered that I'm obsessed
with black and white, which is ironic as a
colorist. But I want to talk to you or ask
you about, does calibration play
a role in black and white images?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is no such thing as
a black and white image. I don't
mean that in the sense that they've got
chromaticity values in them,
because they don't. But when
you're displaying them, there isn't a single
channel that is black and white that goes
to the monitor. It's still using the standard RGB
concept of displaying an image. It's just
that it is balancing them out to try to neutralize
the chromaticity, reduce the saturation and
so on. But a black and white image isn't as simple
as just desaturating the color. The
amount of red, green and blue, if you're talking
about emissive displays, will actually
significantly alter your perception of a black and
white image, because the balance dictates
how much of one color is affecting the actual
density of the black and white image, as it
were. So you can still do some seriously
interesting things with
black and white by understanding
the mix, the ratio mixture of the three color
channels being used to generate the black
and white image, or to control the black and white
image when you're adjusting it.
I have just got to stop myself because I've got so
many more, but I'll finish off with
this last one. So say somebody, maybe it's a home
cinema, or maybe they're a colorist
who are setting up their studio, and they want to
work with you guys. So where would
they start? Obviously, they look you guys up on the
web, and then what happens normally?
Or just reaches out? I guess
normally they email or phone.
Yeah, but you know, there's a lot of different
options as to what kind of services you guys
can offer. If somebody knows exactly what they
want, they're setting up the classic
one, they're setting up a home studio to grade,
maybe because they're doing work that is outside
of a post studio, or they're doing stuff that they
want to work remotely at home,
and then go in and finish it later. They know that
they've bought this monitor that's got
3D LUT capability, and it needs to be calibrated
to give them a chance to be consistent with
what they're doing in the post house or whatever.
And they'll go, right, I need a probe, I need
software, and I just get an order. Because they
know exactly what it is they need. But
more often than not, people will go, we don't know
where to start. We are looking to do
this, we're looking to get into doing this kind of
color critical work. And we have
discussions. And dialogue is a lot of what we're
about. I mean, the number of emails
and phone calls and things that I get daily is
unbelievable. But that's part of it. The
whole concept of education, training,
understanding, and getting
people to realise what it is that
you can do is as big a part of just making a sale.
Because it makes the world easier
if people really understand what it is they're
trying to do and how best to approach it. I
mean, this, you know, talking about sales pitching,
but this this latest thing that we've
literally just announced in the last few days, this
thing called a Image Sequence Pro is
changing the way that you can deal with virtual
sets, the ability to match video walls to
foreground objects, such that the camera captures
the two within the same concept of colour
imagery has been critical. And we just come, you
know what, we'll fix this problem. And it took
us a week or two to do the software. I've got it
here. I've not released it yet. It may get
released today. It certainly will get released in
the next couple of days. But basically, it's
using a camera as a probe to measure the video wall
and make sure that what the camera sees from
the video wall is the same as what it would see off
the foreground objects. So you can cancel out
as much as is possible. The metameric issues
between, you know, what are RGB LED walls and
foreground objects that are lit with better CRI
lighting. There are other ways around it. Brompton
using LED walls now that have got a white pixel to
try to infill some of the CRI value, you know,
infill colours. But even then, you still got to
have the same approach, the camera will never see
the different, you know, an emissive light from an
LED wall with an illuminated foreground isn't
going to be seen the same. Whereas, you know, our
software can fix that. Steve, you are so
interesting. I'm really, really glad that we... Too
bad, too bad it's out there, man. Thank you so
much, so very much for coming on the show and
having me, you know, having this rapid chat with
me. I know there's a lot to dig into, but I'm
really grateful. Thank
you. That's right. No problem.
Cheers, mate.
Steve, thank you so much for
chatting to me. That was fantastic.
After I hit stop on the recording, we continued to
chat for a bit longer about some cool stuff
and I kind of wish I just kept it going. Yeah, a
really fascinating fellow to speak with.
Thank you for joining me everybody. I will put
notes as to where you can find all of Steve Shaw's
information and some of the stuff he's been working
on. Thank you very much to my executive
producer MixingLight.com. If you don't know who
they are, they can help you all things color,
MixingLight.com. To my friend of the show,
Filmlight, thank you very much. To my producer,
Kayla, and to you, thank you for listening. Thank
you so much for listening. We've got one more
episode to go and that's the end of season one. So
yeah, join me next time. Thanks. See you.
The Colour Timer, a micro podcast experience.