Welcome to the Colour Timer Podcast. I am your host
Vincent Taylor. This is the
podcast where we speak to professionals who work
with colour and today I am
speaking to Tom Huczek. He is the founder of
Time In Pixels, the creator of
Nobe OmniScope. I am very much looking forward
to this conversation because I'm
a big fan of this product. I've been using
OmniScope for about six months
and I just adore it. It's amazing. But Timing
Pixels also has some other
products as well which I'm going to speak about. 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 colour to tell stories. Welcome to the
Colour Timer with Vincent Taylor.
Hey Tom, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having
me. How are you doing? Yeah, not too
bad. Not too bad. I'm dealing with
cold LA which of course is not cold
anywhere else in the world but it's cold for me. So
I've got a little remember to
start the sand timer note down
here because sometimes I'll start the
interview and then I forget to do it. So before we
go any further we can start
the game show and away we go. Perfect. You have
done a lot of interviews. I was doing
some research and you know you've done a fair few
number of interviews and it's
not surprising because Time In Pixels
has brought this incredible product
You know, Nobe OmniScope
but I kind of want to go way back first to find out
who you are and how on earth
you got into this world. Yeah, so the journey was
kind of long actually. I'm a
software developer by profession and I have been
doing it for many many years
now. I started a completely different field in
banking sector initially and
telecommunications but my programming hobby
projects always related one way or
the other to some visual things. So early on I
looked into game development, some
graphics programming. So I always liked something
visual that I could impact
myself that I could code some
interesting things into the visual
things on screen. So this was like my hobby early
on and then at some point I
picked up photography and I think this was a
turning point in my career because
I became really passionate about
photography. So I spent every minute
every hour that I could on
getting out with my camera or working in
Photoshop trying to post-process my pictures then
learning about gear, about
lenses, about the cameras, about all the gear. So
down the rabbit hole. Yeah, this
became like really really big passion of mine and I
spent probably a couple of
years really getting into all the details,
everything I could basically.
Some of this transitioned slowly into motion
picture. At some point I started
taking time lapses then I started using DaVinci
Resolve to color grade time
lapses and then I become interested how to
post-process motion picture not only
the still pictures but videos. So this turned into
us because I learned that you're doing
something a little different here.
It's not like applying 20 layers in
Photoshop to make the picture look
really good but you had to approach it
differently. So that's on its own became
interesting to me. Oh this is
different. So I need to learn why it's different
and how to achieve something
good-looking but another way. So I
learned DaVinci Resolve, I started
watching all those tutorials, how to use it, how
color is basically approach color
in videos and so on. And at some point my
profession somewhat merged with my
passion of photography and this video related
things and I found myself a
small project to start on and this
first small project was basically a
false color plugin. I heard somewhere, I think it
was a DP saying that he relies
on false color on set a lot and he
would like to have false color in post
production as well to see the false color overlay
in the grading suite with
his colorist because he speaks
false color language on set that the
contrast ratios, the exposure levels between the
frames and he was lacking
the false color on screen in grading suite and I
thought to myself okay that
sounds like fairly easy thing to
implement and this is the point when I
started actually using my software
development skills in the filmmaking
world and this is how basically the
first product of Time in Pixels got
creatived. That's amazing I love that you say it
seemed fairly easy I'm just
going yeah not to my brain. Yeah you said like
first product tell me tell me
about the products that Time in pixels makes. So on
our website you will see four
products basically at the current moment and the
main one is Nobe OmniScope and
which is probably yeah it's the only standalone
application and the rest false
color, nobe display and nobe color map are plugins.
Primarily for DaVinci Resolve
but most of them work also with Premiere Pro, Final
Cut Pro, also for Photoshop
and some other platforms that support OpenFX
plugins. So the false color
that I already mentioned was the first one which is
basically a tool known from
cameras that DP uses. I think
recently started appearing in software in
various tools now we already have built in false
color in DaVinci Resolve but
when I created false color plugin it was not there
it was probably the first
software version of the false color that you could
use on a computer but it's
yeah fairly simple it turns luminosity into some
predefined ranges of color
and so the idea at least was
pretty easy and pretty simple and then
there was little enhancement to the false color
that a lot of people asked
me to do to create like separate view
of the false color so you can work in
DevInch Resolve and without the
abstracted view in your viewer so you
could see the original image in the
viewer but you could also see the false
color as a scope on your separate screen so I
implemented that and then I got a
lot of questions can you can you make this preview
of just the image without
the false color so basically creating
external view external preview of your
image so that was basically removing the false
color from the application and
this is how Nobe Display got
created with some extra features and
enhancements down the line and after that I created
Nobe Color Remap which was
slightly more complicated and more
advanced plugin for DaVinci Resolve
where you have this hue circle and you can remap
various hues and saturation on
the grid. Right now you have this color warper in
DaVinci Resolve which which is
pretty much what it was back then when it wasn't
available in DaVinci Resolve
but yeah it was it was a really nice
project for me to to dive into color
models transitions between different hue
saturations in different color models so
it was a lot of color theory and an
experimentation that gave me some solid
base for for the future projects
after that which was that a was that a
coincidence then that the very similar thing now
appears in Resolve or or or you
know I don't know I don't really know I can only
say that's fair but it got
pretty popular and a lot of colorists were saying
that it's a great tool but
it's too slow for them because they use grading
panel and they don't want to use
mouse to track the points to open effects plugins
so so the native version will
will win always so yeah yeah it just
became reality unfortunately for me but
what to do. This is a kind of a you know basic 101
question but it's I think it's
really important because you know we
we use scopes in in our industry as
colorists or as editors so here's the question why
are scopes important?
Scopes are basically
measurement tool and they give you
completely objective technical view.
You might have very pricey
reference monitor and it's very accurate
but your brain can play a lot of tricks on you and
having scopes give you like
not color by perception you or your mood so it's
sort of like absolute values of
the image that you're working on so I would say
that's that's the main reason
for using scopes if you spend hours grading the
footage your eyes won't give
you objective view on the image so you can always
rely on your scopes to check
the levels to check and the saturation the
highlights in the shadows so yeah I
think it's indispensable tool in the colorist 100%
I remember oh my gosh years
ago I think I don't know I don't know be grading
maybe three or four years and I
went to a it was just little tiny post house and
they didn't have any scopes
and this was before resolve had scopes built into
it I think it must have been
and I remember going that's okay I'm not sure how
much I actually use my scopes
anyway and I didn't realize how much
you know I'm glancing at them all the
time you know subconsciously you're just kind of
glancing at them all the time
just check and it was really hard to grade without
them you know yeah to kind
of just trust your eyes I you know
speaking of the past you know so back in
the day I had my little Tektronics scopes in my
suite in my next my little pogol
and 20 years ago I guess it was and and now we've
got Nobe OmniScope and
here's a real nasty question
What makes Nobe OmniScope, like better
I would say that OmniScope shares some of the
benefits of the hardware scope one
would be to offload your main station so you're not
running software scopes on
the same machine that you're grading and scopes
usually take some of your GPU
processing power so it's good to have them
separately on a separate machine
yeah and also you're monitoring external signal
you're monitoring the same signal
that goes to your reference
monitor so there is no room for error for
misconfiguration within DaVinci Resolve or
differently like log color
space that you're monitoring or some I don't know
layer that is not visible on
your reference screen but somehow gets into into
the scope preview on in the
software so it's more like
independent from from your workstation and the
benefits that hardware scopes don't have is
basically constant improvement
constant updates the hardware scopes they are not
so that different from the
scopes five years ago 10 years ago 15
years ago the majority of the changes
are like new video standards high
resolution probably some of the HDR
features and and that's it and with Nobe OmniScope
we can implement any customer
feedback feature request and have new version
within a week or two weeks or
a couple of months if the feature is
really big so Nobe OmniScope reacts to
the environment to the changing situation to
basically any idea that's
interesting and it's worth looking and I would say
that's probably 80% of the
features in OmniScope are coming from from the
customers from the community
feels like you know every other week I check and
there's something new that's
come with with OmniScope which which is amazing
is there I don't know if you
can talk about this but is there anything kind of
in the pipeline that's coming up
well there's there's our To-Do list is huge so
it's a matter of what's the most
interesting and most most valuable we've got some
really interesting features
ready but we cannot release them due to some
licensing things not resolved yet so
hopefully we'll be able to announce
some some of that but I think a very
interesting feature that should be available very
soon is SDI out support so
you'll be able to to use your deck link monitor
card to output the signal out of
Omniscope so you can chain and
the signal out of Omniscope or you can
basically send out the scope preview
Right. That's cool.
other way to you know recently very recently
there's been the selection of
tutorial videos that Daria has done that have come
out which are really great
like they they just very really nicely paced and
just kind of really spelled
spell it out and I love that I love
that you guys have gone to the trouble
of just making these accessible for everyone so
everyone understands what's
going on it's really tremendous yeah I think it was
really necessary and what
Daria is doing is really great and I think she's
she's like ideal person for
for this task yeah she's really really good and she
and she just said today do
you work with her to do those or is that something
she's doing on it kind of
on her own? We work on it together yeah more of the
work is probably on her side
but but we talk about this and we shape each each
video together yeah I started
off once again my my time has run out the 15
minutes goes so quickly and I've
got a whole lot more questions but
two other things I just really quickly
wanted to squeeze in at the end I
started off the interview by saying you
know you've done a lot of interviews and I'm
curious are there any questions you
wish someone would ask you yeah for
example very interesting one would be
the future in our field what's what's coming to our
field and I would say that
that VR technology as well as AI in
every corner I think it will have a big
impact on post-production tools and as well as the
hardware that we're using
for basically working with video I think it will
even change all the things in
the post-production pipeline yeah I am and this is
this the last thing I want to
finish off with I'm really impressed with the
support that comes from your
company can you tell me what kind of you know
someone was going to jump into
OmniScope what kind of support they they can get?
I think the best place for that
person would be to go to our Discord
channel it's where everything
happens the bug reports the
idea request the feature requests or
basically you can ask any question there so if if
I'm not there there are many
many people involved in the project that might
answer the question or suggest a
solution so it's it's probably the best place to
start yeah that's great yeah
um thank you so much thanks for I know it's like
it's this tiny little amount
of time to talk about so much but it's a it's a
great to get an overview and and
I mean I'm a little bit biased because I think that
Omniscope is amazing and it's
just kind of I was I was off and on
wether I should get it and then a
couple of colorist friends of mine who I really
respect they said mate once you
get it you won't go back and there and it's
absolutely true I mean it's a
fantastic product so well done thank
you all right thanks mate thanks for
chatting thanks for having me.
Tom, thank you so much for taking time out to come
on the color time of podcast it was really really
great to speak with you if
folks want to know more about
Omniscope or any of the other products from
Time In Pixels, you can check out the
show notes thank you for listening or
watching and like and subscribe and all that kind
of stuff it does help thank
you to my executive producer MixingLight.com if
you're looking at this or
listening to this on their website you
already know what they do but if not
check out MixingLight.com they can help you with
all things color a really
wonderful asset thanks for listening and see you
next time. The color timer a
micro podcast experience