Hi everyone, I'm Kali from Mixing Light and I'm
here today talking to Peter Postma
who's the Managing Director
for the Americas at Film Light.
Thank you so much for joining me
Peter, it's such a pleasure to have you on.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
So you've had such an interesting career.
I met you in your capacity as
Managing Director at Film Light, but
you have worked at Kodak as a
colour engineer prior to that.
And you are an alumni of
Rochester Institute of Technology.
So I just wanted to begin by talking to you about
this career trajectory moving
from Rochester to Kodak and then to Film Light.
These are three real staples of our industry.
So can you tell me a little bit
about what you studied at Rochester and
how that led you to Kodak?
Yeah, I mean some of it was just kind of being in
the right place at the right time,
I guess.
But initially, my interest was actually more in
just kind of computer graphics and
video games in particular.
So I initially was
studying computer science at RIT.
But I quickly found that on the technical side of
things, I wasn't learning
anything in school that I couldn't, I kind of
quickly learned myself just by
reading textbooks and
playing around and stuff like that.
It was the creative side of making images and
making movies that I needed
feedback on.
So after a year in computer science, I actually
switched to the Department of
Film and Animation and ultimately
graduated with a Bachelor's of Fine Arts
in Film and Animation.
But as part of kind of my electives, of course, we
have the Center for Imaging
Science right next door to the School of Film and
Animation says, "Oh, there's
some interesting classes about
colour and vision over there."
So I started taking those and then, yeah, just kind
of saw how I could kind of
really tie together my interests on
the technical side of things and my
interests on the creative side of things by really
focusing on colour for our
industry.
Because a lot of the resources out there for
learning about colour and stuff like
that are much more focused on print press work and
stills and stuff like that.
There wasn't a lot focused on
the motion picture industry.
So it's kind of an exciting area to study.
Definitely.
And it still feels a little bit like that.
I mean, I think, like you
said, right place, right time.
Rochester is one of the only universities that I'm
aware of that does teach colour
science and imaging science
in a really meaningful way.
I certainly know that here
locally, we don't have anything like it.
And so after that, like Rochester and Kodak have a
bit of a crossover of some
kind.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, Rochester is an interesting town because it
is kind of in the middle of
nowhere, upstate New York, but it's the
headquarters for Kodak, the headquarters
for Xerox, the headquarters for Bausch & Loem,
which is a big lens company of
Corning who makes glass for
all kinds of optical devices.
So it really is this kind of hub of kind of optics
and colour science and stuff
like that.
So, yeah, luckily, it was actually one of my
professors in my last year at RIT who
worked for Kodak and was just working as an adjunct
professor who said, "Hey,
there's this opportunity at
Kodak you might want to apply for."
And so I did.
And yeah, I ended up being
with Kodak for five years.
But my first job there actually as just kind of an
intern was actually looking at
different kind of digital image processing
techniques for their laboratory because it
was really right at that cusp where things were
starting to go from film to digital and
what kind of tools that they want to have just for
their own internal team to kind of
assess and process images.
Oh my goodness, that's
fascinating to be on during that transition.
And without implying anything about your age, can
you tell me what year it was then?
Yeah, this was around 2000.
Yeah, around 2000.
OK, so like a good 12 years before it kind of that
that change to digital really
happened in a sort of commercial way.
Yeah, so it was actually 2001 that I moved out to
Los Angeles with Kodak because I
was initially just in Rochester.
And I worked I was still officially in Kodak, but I
worked right next door to
Cinecite, which was the place
where some of the first DIs were done.
So it was right after 'O Bropther, Where Art Thou?'
and one or two other films had
been finished. So really right at
the forefront of that whole DI thing.
And I remember, yeah, I was on the team that helped
build and deploy the first hardware
that could apply a 3D lookup table in real time.
So it was this crazy sun microsystems computer with
all these FPGAs in it just to be
able to process a 3D LUT in real time so the colorist
could see what the film would look
like once they went to record and print it out.
So which is such a simple thing that every color
corrector does now you apply LUTs all
the time, you apply three or four.
But yeah, back at the time, that was quite novel.
So that's unreal.
I mean, we really take it
for granted now, don't we?
And was it during that time that you were part of
the ASE committee to develop the CDL?
Yep. So right when the ASE Technology Committee
formed, luckily, the first meeting just
happened to be on Kodak property.
So I managed to get in the room, so
to speak, and start talking about it.
And yeah, because I already had some experience
supporting digital intermediate at that
point. Yeah, I was part of those early discussions
as to building the CDL because it
was quite clear at that time
that things were going digital.
But also just for supporting film, you know, it
used to be you would actually have
you'd either rent out a movie theater on location
or have like a trailer with a
projector and it's actually do film dailies.
And so this is around the time when film dailies
were going away and digital dailies were
starting to take over.
So you were scanning the
film on a telecine every day.
But the directors of photography saw that they were
kind of losing a key bit of
feedback that they got from the lab because it used
to be, you know, you could look at
what your printer lights were every day and know
kind of how things are going if you
needed to like overexpose a little more underexpose
a little more just if the film
from the last day was good.
But when you just get, you know, a DVD or something
with your dailies on it, you don't
really know, did the telecine operator have to do a
whole bunch of work to make those
dailies look good or were they just, you know,
sliding right into place as they should.
So the CDL was originally kind of thinking as a way
to be able to give feedback to DPs
to say, here's some specific numbers so you can see
if it is in fact being consistent
every day or if something changed and then, oh,
maybe there's a problem with the film or
a problem with the camera or something else with
exposure, we need to go back and check
to provide that kind of key bit of feedback.
I love that idea that the CDL isn't, you know, it's
so much of a grade as it is a
communication tool between the departments because,
you know, that kind of ties into
how CDLs are used now throughout the whole process.
They're communicating that idea from set through to
VFX and through to DI if you want
to if you want to start there.
And to have people who could look at those numbers
and say, oh, this is what they must
have done, you know, it just never occurred to me
that that was happening on the camera
side. So, yeah, that's really cool.
I mean, with printer lights, it does seem a little
bit more straightforward to say, oh,
they put in, you know, a stop of red or took out a
stop of blue or what have you.
But, you know, being only 10 numbers on a CDL, you
could you could look at it and say,
oh, yeah, they changed the
contrast and they offset it up a bit.
So. Right.
Well, and that's actually one of the reasons why we
went with a slope offset power for
CDL rather than lift gamma gain is because in
normal like lift gamma gain controls, there
is no straight offset.
So if you wanted to do just printer lights, you
actually need to combine, you know, two
or three controls to do that.
But when you have offset,
that can be your printer light.
So if you if you do want to kind of stay more in
that kind of printer light mode, only
have three numbers to work about.
You can just use the offset part of the CDL.
And so you only have to track three numbers still.
So that would all still work.
And the beauty of that as well,
that it's completely invertible.
You know, anything that goes up can
just come down again or vice versa.
So you maintain the linearity of the negative,
which is, you know, just a really great and
useful thing to have for other departments anyway.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah. So it's interesting to me that you've kind of
been a part of these committees along
the way that have in a really large way shaped the
workflows and the way that we work
every day.
And yet you're sort of not like
a household name, so to speak.
But you've certainly been there and kind of
developed the way that we work today digitally.
And you're continuing to do that.
And I know I was skipping ahead a little bit, but
you're part of the ACES project at the
moment as well, aren't you?
Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Yeah, I mean, actually, I started with ACES again
very early on, probably over 16 years ago.
I mean, when the first seeds of ACES were planted.
So it was actually while I was still at Kodak.
And there was already this recognition that, again,
things are going digital.
We should have some kind of industry
standard for how to process images.
And it took a good I think it was close to 10 years
before ACES 1.0 finally came out and
everyone could agree on, OK, this is kind of at
least a good first step, if not, you know,
everything we wanted it to be.
So, yeah, that was really just kind of
encapsulating some of the best practices of the
industry at the time to how to
set up a color managed workflow.
And that work continues because, again, when ACES
started, it was still very, very film
centric. It was keeping in mind, like a lot of time
was spent on, OK, how do we bring film
scans in to ACES and how
do we get back out to film?
And of course, these days, that's not so much of a
concern as dealing with all the different
digital cameras, dealing with high dynamic range
display devices and all that kind of
stuff. So, yeah, the ACES committee is getting
pretty close to releasing ACES 2.0, which is
a kind of major upgrade that more directly takes on
those concerns of, yes, super wide
gamut devices, both on the camera and the display
end and dealing with different dynamic
ranges and all that kind of
stuff in an even better way.
And that would be I mean, there's recent
developments in LED walls, you know, and Unreal
Engine and, you know, utilizing backgrounds that
have very saturated and potentially like out of
gamut kind of luminosity and colors to them.
Is that part of what you're
looking at with ACES 2.0 as well?
Yes, I mean, ACES was always designed to be able to
kind of accommodate any possible color.
So any color the human eye can see, you know, is
able to be put in an ACES container.
And there's certain issues that,
you know, ACES can't solve for you.
But certainly it could be, again, that good
foundation, that color managed
workflow that things then fit into.
So it's not going to have like a push button simple
fix to make your screen match
your camera and stuff like that.
But it's part of the workflow you set up that makes
that stuff easier and should make
it consistent so that you can use the
same approach no matter which LED wall you're
shooting with or which camera you're shooting with.
That I think is the biggest thing is to not have to
be dependent on like, you know, different specific
manufacturer solutions so that like,
OK, if I'm shooting with a Samsung wall one day and
a Sony wall the other, I have to do like completely
different techniques just to bring it
again to a basic industry standard, then you could
put your special sauce on top of that.
But at least the basic workflow is the same no
matter what you're doing.
It's fascinating, like the complexity of that and
just trying to deal with all of the variations.
Has there been anything particularly challenging
technology technology wise along the way, like, you
know, in terms of film going out and
digital coming in or any particular technologies
that have been tough nuts to crack?
That's a good question.
I mean, I consider myself very lucky to have
started my career when film was still around so
that I could learn like a lot from the limitations,
really, of the photochemical process, but how much
the engineers at Kodak were able to do to get like
great looking images out of that.
And to me, you know, being the young guy in the
room, a lot of times in those days, it was quite
clear that digital was the future.
That film only had so much life left on it.
But there were a lot of lessons learned that could
then be applied in digital and
digital should be a lot simpler because,
you know, there's so much intricacy involved in the
photochemical process for film.
You know, there's this whole industry that supports
all the different technologies that you need to be
able to lay down the chemicals
on a strip of film to expose it.
But then also the laboratories which can then
develop it and turn that into
an actual image and everything.
You know, if someone were to try to build that
infrastructure today, it would just be impossible.
Whereas digital is supposed to.
I thought digital was going to be a lot simpler.
You know, it's just like you've
got pure numbers you can look at.
You can go back to those same numbers.
You know, you have that magical
undo button that we have in in digital.
But yeah, because as you say, there's constant
technology changes, there's new sensor
technologies, there's new display technologies.
That's, I think the trickiest part really is not
any one particular device that has or technology
that's that's presented a problem.
It's just you have to keep up with all these
different things that are being produced in all
these different corners of the workflow that then
keep pushing it and evolving it.
And I think the biggest change, obviously, in the
last few years has been high dynamic range
displays, both, you know, laser projectors in the
theater that can get a lot brighter and a lot
darker, so much better
contrast and HDR displays in the home.
And we did some very early work with Filmlight with
Dolby, you know, on their early HDR kind of
technology and stuff like that.
But the biggest hurdles, I think, for HDR actually
ended up not being technical.
They ended up being creative. It's like, OK, we now
have this widely expanded palette.
How are we going to take advantage of it?
And I think that's something we're still kind of
figuring out as an industry is,
yeah, what's the best way to use HDR?
And that answer is often
different for every project.
You know, how much of that extended highlight
range, how much of that extended saturation range
do you want to take advantage of?
And when do you know when to kind of be reserved
and not pushed it just because it's there?
Yeah, those aesthetic, you know, the aesthetics of
standard dynamic range have
been around for 100 years.
And, you know, we we kind of have a sense of where
culturally we think skin tones should see it and
where highlights should sit.
But we're kind of like you say,
it's a new frontier creatively as well.
And I think another level of complexity, which I'd
love to understand as well, is that, you know,
working for companies like Kodak and now Filmlight,
you're in a position to be
supporting and contributing globally.
And, you know, different cultures and different
locations have different standards.
So, you know, sometimes I forget that there are a
whole other workflows out there and whole other
displays, you know, in China and in,
you know, the East and other places.
Can you comment at all about dealing with those
kinds of different cultural
culturally used technologies as well?
I don't know how to say that properly, but yeah,
no, I think, you know, because I
am more on the technology side,
you know, helping the creatives do what they do.
My biggest thing is just to provide the tools that
people can take it so they can take advantage of
those new technologies and kind of guide them a
little bit as to how we think
they're supposed to be used.
But then listening to the creatives once they say,
oh, I like this, I don't like this and just
constantly evolving that.
And yeah, you're right. It can be
very different for different cultures.
I mean, even if you look at just like stereoscopic,
you know, which had a big resurgence a couple of
years ago, it's still actually quite huge in China.
For whatever reason, in China, they really like
their stereoscopic 3D movies.
So we still have to maintain our 3D tools, even
though it's much less common, you know, in the US
and Europe and some other parts of the world.
So, but yeah, so we maintain all those tools.
And if, you know, someone in our sides of the world
wants to take advantage of it,
they're there to take advantage of it.
But if they don't, they don't have to.
So we've talked about being at Rochester and Kodak.
What was the work that you were
doing at Kodak as a color engineer?
Like, what would a day look like in that role?
So initially, as I said, it was kind of just
evaluating software tools that were in the industry
for people at the research lab at Kodak to use.
So it was because Kodak, of course, had developed
the the Cineon software, which was on the first
digital compositing software.
And that used to be their
own internal tool as well.
But once Kodak abandoned that, you know, again,
technology and industry moved on.
So they need to needed to move on to.
So I was helping them evaluate, OK, what can they
do with Shake, which is another compositor or
Raise, which was a new compositer
at the time that was coming out.
And also just different tools for
dealing with digital still cameras.
And so actually, once I had kind of done my initial
evaluation, those different devices, that's when I
got involved in a project which eventually be
called the Kodak Look Management System, where you
could take an image with a digital still camera and
then put that through a film emulation to see,
well, what would this look like if I
shot with, you know, 5218 negative?
Or what would it look like if I
shot with a slower speed film?
What would it look like if I did a
bleach bypass or things like that?
So we had these digital emulations
of all these photochemical processes.
And so when the director and the DP are on set
deciding, you know, what stock they want to go to,
what film process they want to use, they could
shoot an image with a digital still camera on the
day, put it through the software and
emulate all those different things.
So for a couple of years, I was involved in that
project and managing, yeah, kind of profiling
different SLR cameras to get them into that
software and then making sure we're accurately
emulating those different different processes.
What kind of tools did you use to do that?
Were you like, you know, looking at things through
a microscope or, you know,
like how does one do that?
It really is a mix of things.
And a lot of it was kind of just homegrown by some
of the color scientists I work with and just kind
of evolved over the years.
So a lot of it was just standard densitometry.
So, you know, like you record out a bunch of film
patches or different densities on film and then
measure that with a densitometer.
And you take that information and or you measure it
with a spectrophotometer so you can get the full
spectrum of the light that's shining through the
film and capture that and put it into your model.
For profiling like the digital still cameras, we
actually came up with this little device that had a
piece of dichroic glass in it that you could slide
up and down to basically
capture the full spectrum of light.
So we had a full spectrum white light behind this
dichroic glass that you could shift in like exact
increments and basically take a
whole bunch of stills to profile.
So basically how it was seeing each wavelength of
light and get a full profile then of how the
sensor, how that digital sensor reproduced light,
match that up with your measurements of the film.
And that's how you kind of got
the emulation between the two.
So that's unreal. I mean, that kind of physical
thing, you know, I just I don't think a lot of us
actually take into account that there are like
prisms and bits of glass.
Like, you know, that feels like something that
happened in like the 1800s when they were first
learning about the different
colors of light and things, you know.
But obviously it's still a part of practice today,
just in a more sophisticated way.
But I've never once in my life, you know, gotten a
prism and looked at looked at light through it.
I just think, wow, that's really interesting.
And so what when you moved over to FilmLight, were
you doing similar kinds of work there
or was that a bit of a shift for you?
It was a bit of a shift, but not not radically.
So my first job at Filmlight was supporting our
Truelight color management software.
And it was going in and
helping people calibrate their D.I.
Theaters to match, you know, what they were
ultimately going to see on film, because at that
time film was still considered
the hero deliverable for most shows.
Digital cinema was already starting to roll out.
But since most people were seeing theater, most
directors were used to seeing film in a theater,
they kind of considered film
their main primary deliverable.
So they wanted to make sure when they're color
grading in D.I. that they're seeing as close as
possible with the film is
ultimately going to look like.
So that was, again, yeah, measuring film with
densitometers to make sure we're accurately profiling
the output of, you know, that facility specific
film recorder and the lab
that they were working with.
And then measuring with a probe the projector to
see how it's reproducing light.
And again, you know, meshing those two together to
make the digital projector
look as close as possible to film.
So, yeah, there's a lot of running around.
It was just fun, as you know, Filmlight is a very
international company and there are a lot of
different corners of the world
that were starting to get into D.I.
So I traveled around quite a bit,
just going into these different D.I.
Theaters, helping them calibrate
their their rooms and set them up for D.I.
I bet they looked good, you know, like once they'd
all been calibrated, I bet they were
looking the best they'll ever look.
Yeah, of course, the trickiest thing with film is
that because it's a photochemical process, you
know, it's not 100 percent locked down.
So that was always a frustrating thing, is that,
you know, we could always exactly
match what the lab did yesterday.
The question is, is that what's
going to come out of the lab tomorrow?
So sometimes you have these awkward conversations
where you have to say, like, I know what I'm doing
in the lab is that fault here or, you know, kind of
figure out or are we doing something?
And so, yeah, it's kind of funny that in those
days, again, towards the end of D.I., like, I think
film laboratories are at their absolute best
because, you know, you have this rock solid digital
projector to compare it to now.
So the post house could say, you
know, hey, the lab was a little off today.
We got to reprint this. You
got to fix what you're doing.
So the labs actually got better.
They were doing it much tighter controls as well.
So yeah. Yeah.
Oh, that's so interesting to
be able to side by side it.
You know, I find today that I'm I'm constantly
hearing back from clients that, oh, we just watched
the DCP and it's not looking the
same as it did in the grade suite.
And then you have to say, well, you
know, have you measured the screen?
Do you know if the lamps that it's full brightness?
You know, you've got so many questions and
commercial cinemas, I don't think,
are doing that level of calibration.
But it's that thing of just, you know, being able
to say to somebody, look, when we looked at it
during the D.I., it was correct there.
And if it's deviating, at least we
know where where it's deviating from.
Right. Right.
Because you can't control every screen.
But wouldn't it be nice to be able to send someone
out and say, OK, it's going to get calibrated
before you screen for the
short film festival or something?
Well, I'm lucky enough to live in Los Angeles where
some facilities for certainly
for larger titles will do that.
You know, if they're going to have a big film
premiere or, you know, they know
that it's it's an important screening,
they will actually send someone out to measure the
screen and make sure it's properly set up because,
yeah, that is one of the most frustrating things I
think about what we do is
that you can always trust that an
calibrated environment is going to look great.
But once it gets onto someone's screen in their
home, who knows if they'll actually
be seeing what you intended or not.
So, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I do joke that it
would be nice to send my Sony monitor out for
everyone to look at things on and just ditch their
iPads and phones and TVs.
But unfortunately, we can't
provide everyone with that.
At the same time, one of my favorite anecdotes was
from a DP I talked to who
watched digital dalies on his laptop.
And he said it was great
because he could grade him himself.
If he wanted him a little darker,
he just tilt his laptop that way.
If he wanted it brighter
just tilt his laptop that way.
So he'd just grade his dailies by tilting a screen.
Oh, my goodness. Oh, that gives me
the chills. I don't like that at all.
For dailies, that's fine, I think. But yeah,
certainly when you get to the final, you don't want
to be leaving it to that.
It worries me, especially in short form, what some
people are watching things on on their phones, you
know, at the pub or something.
Yeah. So going all over the world and calibrating
things and using the true light system.
I mean, was the true light system sort of in
existence before base light was was that like?
Before Baselight or part of, how did that work?
So film light actually got started as kind of like
the R&D group from Computer Film Company
and all our first three main products, the
Northlight scanner, the base light
color correction system and true light color
management are early
versions of that all existed in CFC
before it split off and became a separate company
called Filmlight, where we
said, hey, we can, you know,
bring these tools to the industry at wide.
It doesn't have to be, you know,
just for this one, one company.
So Northlight was actually our scanner was the
first product that really kind of took off.
True light and base light kind of came out at
around the same time, but true light definitely got
traction a lot quicker because true light would
work with, you know, any color
correction set up any any kind of theater.
And obviously, you know, if you don't have that
basic color correction in place, you can't even
start to begin to do to do a DI.
So yeah, actually, when I joined Filmlight, I
didn't really know much about base light at all.
I said, oh, well, this true
light stuff is rock solid.
I've seen it before. I'm
happy to go out and utilize it.
This base light thing is kind of
interesting, but I haven't seen it.
I don't know what it does.
And but as I was working with the other people at
Filmlight, I said, wow, there's actually, you know,
something something really great here.
And and yeah, so base light was kind of the last
product to grow up and get widespread adoption.
But and you hadn't done color
correction yourself prior to that.
Only only technical kind of color correction.
So I knew how to like drive a DaVinci 2K and how to
drive a Pogle, but mostly just for how to set up a,
you know, a Telecine the right way.
Another one of the
projects I worked on at at Kodak.
I've actually forgotten the name of it, but it was
a product to to to again kind of make the film
transfer process more consistent and set up a
Telecine more like a scanner.
So you could take, you know, whether it's a spirit
scan Telecine or I.T.K. or whatever, we we
developed some reference calibration film that
you'd put on the Telecine with specific targets
that you'd have to, you
know, adjust the knobs to to hit.
And then you would know that your Telecine was
actually making kind of standard Cineon scans much
more like a film scanner that would
be used for VFX and things like that.
So I knew how to, you know, drive the controls to
do that kind of technical grading,
but never never creative grading.
Did you ever sort of get the bug for creative color
grading or have you always felt felt more like the
technology was was who you are?
Yeah, I'm very cognizant of the fact that, you
know, being a colorist, a huge part of your job is
kind of client management and client communication.
You know, it's figuring developing that that
language with them about what does it mean when
they say they want something redder or brighter or
darker or that sort of stuff.
And I fully respect that.
And I kind of decided that that that's interesting,
but that's not what I want to do.
I want to focus more on kind of
what's going on under the hood.
And, yeah, certainly like one of the great things I
think about BaseLight is that there's strong color
science underpinning all our
tools and everything we do.
And that's part of why I think we can explain why
the tools are the way they are is because we've
really thought through, like, we don't just want to
make some knob that makes the image looks zazzy.
And, you know, sometimes it
works and sometimes it doesn't.
It's actually like, why are we
doing the image processing this way?
Is this the best way to do that?
That's going to give you the most control over the
image and keep things looking natural and not just
like, you know, all electronic and weird.
So, yeah, I really like being a part of that
process of developing those creative tools and then
handing them over to people who can get inside
other people's heads and figure out how to actually
get the images they want out of it.
Yeah, it is such a different, like, discipline,
isn't it, to understand the technology that
underpins it as opposed to being
able to deploy it in a session.
But you've trained a lot of colorists.
I'd be surprised if you couldn't sit
down and grade something pretty well.
Yeah, I could.
I've done a few, like, indie projects and for
friends and stuff like that.
But, yeah, again, I just decided
that wasn't what I wanted for my career.
So when I spent some time with you and you trained
me, you showed me through the current features as
well as some of the new features that are coming
out in version six of Baselight.
And I just wanted to talk about a few of them
because it's actually quite fascinating to me
because prior to that, I hadn't had such a huge.
Kind of interaction with Baselight and I was kind
of taken aback by just how, like you
said, thought through the tools were.
So one thing which I really enjoyed were the tools
that worked in the perceptual color space.
Can you talk to me about those?
That was base grade mainly in version five.
Yeah.
So, I mean, the big evolution, I think, in
Baselight over the past few years has been focused
on tools that really emulate
the physics of light and the
way our eye reacts to light.
So as opposed to like our early tools like film
grade tried to emulate what happens in a film lab
when you adjust printer lights or, you know, vary
the processing a little bit to adjust contrast.
And video grade emulates what happened in a
telecine, which, of course, was originally kind of
analog voltage adjustments.
So really just trying to work with the limited
tools they had at the time to adjust the color.
So with base grade, which debuted a few years ago,
that was really one of our first major attempts to
say, okay, we have this
color management in place now.
We can know what the original light
coming into the camera looks like.
We know how the human eye works.
So let's make a grading tool that acts more like a
camera does and more like the human eye does.
So instead of grading in some RGB space, whether
that's, you know, based on the camera sensitivity
to RGB or your displays reproduction of RGB.
Let's say we'll just work in human perceptual space
because that's that's what color is.
It's the name we give to
how the human eye sees light.
So let's focus on that.
And so, yeah, we brought it into this human
perceptual space and we just made
the tools work consistently to the way
DPs and other filmmakers think about color in terms
of, you know, stops of exposure or color
temperature rather than just kind of like, you
know, arbitrary RGB numbers.
So.
And so in order to do that, because there has been
a lot of research into how the eye sees, did you
take that research and translate it into like a
digital map of some kind?
Like, how did that happen?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, there's there is a lot of research done on
on human vision and still there still is stuff that
we don't really completely understand.
I think like we have a complete, you know, physical
model of the eyeball and how the cells and our
retina work and all that.
But then there's this big squishy brain behind it.
And that's the part that you can't exactly, you
know, just like pick a pick apart.
So there's still some stuff that happens in our
visual processing that we're not quite sure why it
happens or what part of the brain
it happens in and that sort of stuff.
But certainly for the initial part of the eye,
that's all very well modeled.
And so, yeah, we were able to take some academic
research papers that that model that behavior and
kind of trim the bits we didn't need to simplify it
to get it running in real time and that kind of
stuff to actually do the conversion
into the visual space and
then adjust the colors in there.
And so you were talking about color management and
color management workflows have been really
important to you throughout your whole career.
And one thing which I was interested in in
BaseLight was that you're
always working color managed.
You can't get outside of that.
Right.
So within that color management system, you have
like another little bubble for this tool.
So it's working within another color space, but
that's all handled automatically within BaseLight.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So of course, the way the color management system
works is at first have to know like what camera was
used to acquire the image.
So most of the time for camera original footage,
you know, we'll know if it was shot on RED or Sony
or ARRI or GoPro or what have you.
So we've profiled all those cameras and can bring
them from that camera native color space into
whatever color space you want.
And yeah, for what I call like our legacy tools
like video grade for lift gamma gain or film grade
or stuff like that, you can choose
what color space you want to work in.
So you could say, you know, I'm
primarily in ARRI show shooting Alexa.
So even though there's a few shots done on Canon
camera or a few shots done on RED, I can actually
bring them all into the ARRI
color space and grade with it there.
So my tools feel consistent.
But then beyond that, yeah, when you get to
Base Grade and some of our new
tools like Xgrade and ChromaGen,
they work in their own internal color space, which
is that human perceptual space.
And so, yeah, that basically lets us emulate those
those real world processes, regardless of what
camera you shot with at the start.
In terms of the way that it looks, you know, it's
hard to describe it, talking about it.
But when you're actually using it as a colorist, I
was so, so happy with how like
mainly saturation was mapped.
If you saturate an image in base grade, you never
get into those kind of electric colors that you can
reach when you've got Rec.
709 primaries controlling your saturation.
So it's definitely something
that's worth every colorist.
If you're no matter what system you use, just
jumping in to the Baselight Look software, which
is now available, you can you can
just download it to learn and play.
It is worth jumping in and just seeing what base
grade does and how it reacts, because it is a
slightly different experience when you're grading.
You know, you might be used to offset grading, but,
you know, to have these
controls like Flair and the ranges,
like you've got Bright and Dim and Dark and Light,
I think it is on the two panels.
I hope I got that right. Yeah.
They all operate just a little bit differently from
other tools we might be used to using and
especially the Flair control.
I mean, it's just worth having a play.
Well, thanks. Yeah, I mean, that's that's good to
hear. It means we we did our job.
So it is super good fun.
And you also mentioned another couple of tools that
work in that perceptual color space, which is X
grade and chromogen, which are these six tools that
are coming out there in beta at the moment.
Is that right? That's correct.
Can you tell me about those
because they are just something else?
Yeah, so X grade is a tool that's, again, kind of
plots all the colors in a human perceptual space.
So it's not exactly the same as the space that base
grade uses, actually, but it kind of plots the
colors out so that an equal amount of change in
that tool will be perceived the same as your eye,
because we're, for instance, more sensitive to
changes in like blue and purple hues than we are in
green hues or for saturation the same way.
We're more sensitive to
saturations in some color than another.
So that color space, first of all, kind of smooths
everything out so that you know, if you're making
the same amount of change in X grade, you're going
to see this perceive the same
amount of change with your eye.
And it basically when we built it, we looked at,
you know, other tools which allow you to manipulate
the full color space as kind of a mesh to be able
to like, you know, basically just push color colors
around and mold them like clay.
And we found it was a really interesting way to
adjust colors, but also a really quick way to
destroy the image because you can quickly get
images crossing over with each other causing
banding artifacts and tearing
and noise and stuff like that.
So we said, how could we do this, you know, more
smoothly and more
consistently to get a good result?
And the first was moving it from an RGB color space
into this human perceptual space where everything
is evenly weighted for all the colors.
And then the second was rather than, you know, like
just manipulating a 3D lookup table directly, let's
make it so you have kind of areas of influence
almost like you are molding clay and pushing stuff
around so that, you know, when you push really hard
in the green and then you push, you know, the red
direction in another way, it kind
of pulls a little bit of it with it.
So you don't get that tearing, you're just
constantly kind of molding the colors around.
And yeah, just ended up kind of being this really
organic way to quickly do what would normally be
secondary color correction.
So normally, if you wanted to make, you know, your
reds a little bit more orange and make your greens
more saturated and make your, you know, blues
darker, you'd have to do three different keys and a
bunch of windows and stuff to protect for exactly
what you want it to affect.
But with X-grade, you just kind of grab that part
of the color space, push it the direction you want
to go and do the same in the three other color
spaces and basically automatically interpolates and
smooth between them so that you're
not getting any of those artifacts.
Yeah, I mean, I've tried pushing it every way you
can imagine. And like you say, like one point will
always affect the others and it'll protect you from
from going into crazy town.
Another feature that I really like about it is the
neutral line that runs through the center.
So it did take me a little while to get my head
around exactly what that was doing.
But it looks almost like
degrees Kelvin running through.
Yeah, exactly. We kind of highlight where the
standard black body white points are so that, you
know, if you do want to keep stuff more neutral, of
course, there's nothing as no such thing as being
truly neutral because you're always neutral with
respect to some white point.
So you can decide kind of what that white point is.
But we also have, yeah, kind of like an anchor so
that it keeps stuff that is
close to neutral more neutral.
So when you're pushing other stuff around, you're
not suddenly pushing, you know, your grays towards
red, your grays towards green and stuff like that.
So that was kind of another key component we
realized early on is that normally you want to keep
your your neutral scale kind of grounded and be
pushing the colors around it
rather than shifting the whole image.
But you can take that pin out if you do want to go
crazy and push everything around.
You can do that, too. So it's also really nice to
just have that representation on screen because it
can show like I was playing with it the other day
and looking at, you know, I wanted to grab this
warm color and which
direction do I want to push it in?
Well, if I push it down the neutral line, it's
cleaning up and becoming neutralized.
If I push it the other
way, it's getting more orange.
So, you know, for me, it's like almost a part of a
map for me to to know where I am in space as well.
And it's also got ranges, which which I was having
a play with and discovering the other day as well.
So you can do a little bit of work more so in your
dim zone or more so in your
bright zone if you switch it over.
So I think there's like like any of these tools,
they start off looking quite
simple, like, OK, it's color warper.
And then you start to change a few parameters and
you're like, oh, wow, OK, this can really do some
pretty, pretty cool stuff in terms of look.
But yeah, definitely the, you know, utilizing it,
that's that's another thing which I really like
about the tools in Baselite as a whole,
is that there are a lot of tools in the main
grading options that can save
you from going to secondaries.
So Hue Shift is one that I would use every time.
It might be my favorite tool.
Being able to alter the value of a hue and, you
know, brighten skin tone a little bit and perhaps
darken a background a bit rather than adding a
window for a face or darkening
off a background with a vignette.
You know, I can just do that
right there in the main page.
So, you know, is that something that you guys are
interested in particularly is
keeping away from the secondaries?
Yeah, that was definitely a thing we consciously
worked on, because any time you do a secondary,
you're literally like carving out a part of the
image, treating it totally differently and then
trying to slap it back into that original image.
So that's always going to be problematic.
That's why, yeah, any time you pull a key, you have
to go in and watch it through, check for noise,
smooth it out, blur it, you
know, throw a window on it.
So it's only affecting the
part of the image you want.
You know, there's all these kind of extra steps you
have to do that eats up a lot of time.
And again, it's just not the best thing for the
image because you're really now kind of taking
things down a different path.
And that's something that, you know,
ideally you should never have to do.
You know, if you're able to capture an image you're
happy with, you should be able to just kind of mold
it to what you want to do
without having to tear it apart.
So, yeah, we're not going to completely replace
secondary color correction.
There were always be those times where you do want
to be super isolated with what you do or do have to
attack a very specific part of the image where they
weren't able to get light in on
the day on set or that sort of thing.
But for the vast majority of stuff, you know, if
it's lit pretty well, you shouldn't
have to carve up the image like that.
And not having to worry about that to constantly
have to go back and check,
oh, is the key noisy here?
Oh, is it tracking through
the whole length of the shot?
Just saves a tremendous amount of time in color
correction because you quickly with these primary
tools, you quickly develop the trust that, OK, if I
grade it well on this frame, that's going to
translate well to all these
other versions of the shot.
And you don't necessarily have to carefully QC them
all when you're setting the look, you just know
it's, you know, it's going to work.
So you're definitely time savers for sure.
I can see X grade adding a lot of
productivity to people's workflows.
ChromaGen is another new tool in V6,
which to me is just like its own beast.
It could be its own program.
Can you tell me a bit about chromagen?
Yeah, so chromagen is a look development tool.
So as opposed to X grade, which is very much for
kind of shot by shot grading, you know, adjusting
each shot individually, chromagen is a set of tools
to help you develop a look that you might apply to
a whole sequence or even to a whole show.
And we developed the tools again in a human
perceptual space so that when you're manipulating
colors, you're doing it based on sound
photochemical photographic
principles and the way the human eye works.
And it's specifically designed to kind of be broad
enough strokes that they do translate well across a
variety of different
shooting conditions and images.
So you can't be too isolated with the controls.
Like you can't do what you would do with a color
key or stuff like that specifically so that it will
hold up to a wide range of shots.
But what we found was that even with all the color
tools in Baselight, there are some color operations
which are often a part of look development that
aren't easy to emulate with current color tools.
So particularly when you think about like emulating
a film look, there's a lot of crosstalk that
happens between the color channels.
So like when you expose something that's green on
film, it's not just affecting the magenta dye
layer, which is where green is recorded.
It's actually bleeding into the
cyan layers as well, a little bit.
So we developed matrices and things like that which
can emulate that process on a technical level.
But artistically, that wasn't something there was
really a tool in the color
correction that can handle.
So we specifically want to make sure, OK, we can
adjust those kind of crosstalk
effects between the color channels.
But then also just kind of where
do you put the bumpers on your look?
So like if you want to be able to know that the
look for this show has a certain red quality to it.
Like you always want to skew towards a certain red.
And that could be for a commercial where it's like
a particular brand color you
want to make sure you're staying on.
Or it could be just when you're developing a
feature film or TV show or something like that.
Like there's certain kind of
signature colors you want that look to have.
And that's something you can do shot by shot with
Hue Shift and tools like that to kind of
consistently push things towards the same
flavor of red or towards the same flavor of blue.
But ChromaGen lets you do that as part of your
basic look development to say, OK, I
want all my reds to look like this.
And I want my dark reds to be this way and my
brighter reds to be this way.
Or I don't want to allow my reds to be too
saturated, but I do want my
blues and greens to be saturated.
So you kind of can define the color
space on which you're going to grade.
And then once you've set that look for the show,
you're just kind of grading, doing your adjustment
shot to shot underneath that.
But the broad strokes of the look are then set.
But yeah, it did end up becoming almost a color
corrector within a color corrector because it's got
a whole bunch of tools for how you set up that
color space that you're going to work within or
that color palette really that
you're defining for your show.
But the idea is that these
are the stages, aren't they?
The stage that you have with all of the different
sort of would you call them
tools within the stages or options?
Well, I mean, we could we could just as easily call
them layers, but we didn't want to confuse them
with the layers that are already within your your
main grading stack in baselight.
So that's what we opted to call them stages.
And each one of those operators, I guess you could
say, just kind of a slightly different way of
tweaking the color and you can combine them in
different ways to kind of cover the
whole color space you want to cover.
Yeah, so I suppose, you know, where you might
otherwise use a look or perhaps a LUT or, you know,
create some curves that you're going to put across
everything, you would use ChromaGen instead.
And using those stages, insert different tools that
are meaningful to the project you're on, like color
cross talk or contrast or...
There's a few that I'd never heard of before.
Like, can you talk me through, do you remember off
the top of your head what the stages are?
Because there's I'm putting on the spot here, but
there was some that I was like, I wouldn't know
what that was if I hadn't seen it here.
Well, yeah, some of them are named just because we
had to come up for the terminology, which isn't
something that regularly gets talked about.
So in some ways we're choosing the terms.
They're not, you know, industry standard terms.
I thought I'd missed a memory.
No, but yeah, a lot of it came out of, you know,
for a long time in Baselite, we've had this look
tool which allows you to apply preset looks.
So if you want a Kodak film look or a Fujifilm look
or a reversal as negative look or a bleach bypass
look, you could apply those.
But they were like look up tables.
They were kind of, you
know, could turn them on or off.
You could vary the strength a little bit.
But that that was it.
Like, if you really like the film look, but you
just didn't like the way the greens came out, you
wanted the greens to be, you know,
more yellow or less yellow or whatever.
It was kind of hard to tweak that look because
everything is all tied together in this one LUT,
basically that gets applied or not.
So with ChromaGen, we're able to
reproduce those same kind of looks.
We can produce different film looks.
We can produce different photochemical processes or
just, you know, other other creative looks.
But now they're broken down into steps so you can
tweak just the part you want.
So you can say, yeah, I love the Kodak film look,
but I don't want my highlights to be warmer.
I want them to stay neutral.
Or I do want my greens to be a little more green
and a little less yellow.
So you can tweak just those parts of the look that
you want rather than it being kind of all or
nothing thing that you would get with a LUT.
And are they going to be presets?
Because I feel like if it was a preset, I'd be
reaching for it all the time.
That's that's the way actually I recommend most
people introduce themselves to ChromaGen is, yeah,
we have a set of presets.
Some of them match the
existing looks in base light.
Some of them are totally new.
But yeah, I think that's that's certainly the way I
learn and am able to wrap my head around things
often is just by kind of just looking at examples
of what works and then picking it
apart and seeing how it got there.
So yeah, I definitely recommend people look at the
presets and then just kind of just turn things on
and off, adjust the knobs,
see what each step is doing.
And then you start to
really wrap your head around it.
I mean, that's another one
that's well worth having a play with.
I know it's still in beta, but there are various
places that are running the beta that you may be
able to get your hands on it or, you know,
of course, there's a lot of materials out there on
the FilmLight website about, you
know, showing you what it's going to do.
And who made that one?
Whose baby was that?
It's Daniele Siragusano.
Siragusano. So it's Daniele Siragusano, who's
one of our image pipeline
engineers based out of Germany.
He was really the chief architect on that working
closely with Richard Kirk, who's another one of our
color scientists in London.
So, yeah.
Wow. Okay. So I imagine that he's got a range of
resources that you could look at.
Is that I seem to have seen a couple of things
flowed into my inbox that
he's doing talks about it.
Yes. Yeah. So there's a number of videos already.
And certainly once version six launches, there'll
be a bunch more resources out there for to kind of
explain what all those different
different steps in the tool do.
And you mentioned Richard Kirk as well.
And just a side note, if anyone is interested in
color science at all, which you probably are, if
you're listening to this interview, his book, Color
Sense and Measurement is well worth a read.
And I believe you can
actually get a PDF of it online.
So, yeah, there's information
on that on the Filmlight website.
And it's definitely a great read because, yeah,
there's very few, as I said, early on kind of
resources for color in our industry.
You know, a lot of them are focused on pre-press
and photography and stuff like that.
So it's great that he wrote a book that's very
focused on color
management for film and television.
And it's actually really readable.
Like I was surprised. I thought, oh, my goodness,
what am I getting myself into?
You know, I'm going to be hit with a bunch of
equations and my eyes are
going to glaze over real quick.
But it was actually a page turner.
So he's got a really good
kind of personality behind it.
I think it's not dry at all. So
it's so well worth a check out.
And I saw that recently you did some talking about
cloud grading, grading in the cloud.
Is that something that's new for version six?
They're going to be new tools for that.
Because I haven't actually watched it, so I'd be
really interested to have a recap on that one.
Yeah, no, it's not new for version six.
So, yeah, we've been able to run Baselight in the
cloud for a little while now.
Initially, it was just the render engine.
So if you just wanted to render or transcode a
bunch of media in the cloud,
that's been available for a long time.
The new thing that we partnered with Amazon almost
a year and a half ago now was to be able to run
actually a fully interactive
Baselight session in the cloud.
So all the storage, all the image processing,
everything was done in the cloud and you're just
getting the output streamed down to you.
And of course, the big challenge for color
correction is that it
needs to be super interactive.
If you're adjusting a trackball or a knob, you need
to see the change to the image right away.
If you're spinning a dial and then a second or two
later, the image changes, you're going to
constantly be like overshooting or undershooting or
not knowing what you're doing.
So that was the biggest thing we really had to
overcome was getting that latency down.
And we basically done it.
So we now have high quality image streaming with
very low latency out of the cloud.
Color grading in the cloud on its
own, I think, doesn't make much sense.
Like you wouldn't do a production the traditional
way and then push everything up with
the cloud just to color correct it.
The economics and the time involved
to do that doesn't make any sense.
But as studios are looking at doing more and more
of their work in the cloud already, there is a lot
of VFX work done in the cloud.
That's pretty standard.
But if you're also doing your editing and your
sound mixing and everything else, then it makes
sense to keep it in the cloud for color correction
because it's possible now.
And ultimately to the colorist, it
shouldn't really feel any different.
They shouldn't know the difference between whether
they're working on a baselight that is in the
machine room down the hall or in some cloud data
center hundreds of miles away.
And so that's what we worked on is just making it
possible that you could work either way.
And that's pretty much all working.
So there's definitely, again, some economic things
you have to consider with how you deploy the
resources in the cloud and
the time to set it all up.
But, yeah, the technology is there and ready.
That's amazing. I just do use a virtual machine to
color grade seems like another another world.
I mean, one thing which is unique to base light is
that it's turnkey system and you've got certain
configurations that you support and
you know that that is going to work.
So so those are the ones that you
sell. Is it the same in the cloud?
You found the configuration now
that works and that's the one.
Yeah. So it's still kind of preset configurations.
And a big reason for that is really just for the
support so that we know if there's something that's
not working right, it's on us.
Whether it's a hardware issue, a software issue, a
config issue, you know, you have one number to call
and we'll we'll sort it out.
So I mean, that support is pretty incredible.
While I was in the office with you that week, I was
seeing the phone ringing all the time and you were
plugged into the community
and helping people in real time.
And the experience of using a base light is is
having that plug in to this community of people
who, you know, you're not
talking to somebody who's selling it.
You're talking to someone who's actually made it
and who has a stake in it.
You know, like I remember actually an anecdote of
one of my friends saying, oh, I was complaining to
Bob about something to do with the control surface.
And he's like, oh, I actually did some of the
electronics and now what
is it that what's going on?
You know, can you talk to me at all about that
support aspect and just being there for people?
Yeah, I mean, that's a huge part of what we do and
a huge part of why I like working for Filmlight is
we are, you know, a relatively small company who's
focused on color correction
and focused on this industry.
And it's it is a very innovative industry.
So as we said, there's new cameras, new display
devices coming out all the time.
But also filmmakers are looking to push things in
different directions and different ways.
So we're constantly involved in new projects and
new things and new ways of doing things.
And yeah, so it's great that we can be a resource
there to filmmakers or, oh, hey, someone just
walked in the door with this camera.
I've never seen it before.
Is there anything I need to know, any kind of
caveats to what we could tell them?
Well, here's our experience
here that we've discovered.
And, you know, if you learn
anything new, let us know, too.
So sometimes we are acting as kind of like a little
bit of a middleman to be able to get firsthand
experience with with new cameras and new display
devices and then share that with other people who
are who are working on them later down the line.
And also, like, you've got all of these backwards
compatible tools, like you've got
all of these legacy tools there.
So, you know, I imagine that it's not just the new
technology that you're supporting.
Like, if I was to unarchive something from 10 years
ago now and try to get my head around it,
especially if it was somebody
else's job, I think I'd go crazy.
So, you know, is that also something that you're
supporting people unarchiving old jobs as well?
Yeah, that's kind of one of the founding principles
with the way Baselite was built, is that you can go
back to any Baselite you've seen, no matter how
many years ago, and upgrade it.
And it'll still work and produce the same image in
the current release of Baselite.
So, yeah, I was actually just talking to someone a
few days ago who had an archival project from I
think it's 12 or 13 years ago, they wanted to bring
back online and they were able to.
So they were able to recover that job, see exactly
what was done to the image and then tweak it from
there for the new new pass that they wanted to do.
Wow. And is it true that they would be able to use
the databases saved undo's to go back and undo
everything in that 12 year old job?
Yeah, exactly. Again, that's just the way Baselite
stores its project files.
It's basically a history of every key press and
every change you've done.
So you can literally hit undo and see every step
that was made to get to where you were.
And that could be great for us in support too,
because if someone kind of paints themselves in a
corner, we can actually undo and
see every step they went to get there.
So we can actually pick it
apart and see what was done.
So what does your typical day look like? Are you
fielding support calls a lot of the time?
Are you working on special projects?
Yeah, all of the above. I mean, I think I'm pretty
lucky in that I don't have a typical day.
Sometimes I'm doing training with the colorist.
Sometimes I'm just kind of jumping in on support
calls, picking up the phone with
my background in color science.
Like I tend to focus more on the support calls that
are much more kind of color workflow oriented or
color calibration oriented,
where we have other people on the support team who
will focus more on technical issues integrating
with storage or things like that.
And then sometimes it's
just completely new projects.
I actually just got back. I was in Las Vegas last
weekend for the premiere of Deron Aronosky's
Postcard from Earth at the Sphere in Las Vegas,
which is this giant LED wall.
That's I forget how many stories, but it's like a
16000 seat venue with a giant LED wall that
completely surrounds your vision.
So there were some unique challenges in getting
that project over the finish line for color
calibration and also just dealing with the geometry
of the space and the screen and all that.
So yeah. Wow. Oh, can you tell me more about that?
What was your involvement in the sphere?
Because everyone's talking
about it with U2 playing there.
Yeah. Yeah. So some of it under
NDA therefore, I can't go into too much detail.
Of course. Of course.
But yeah, so the colorist for the first kind of
traditional film that was produced for the sphere
was Tim Sippen and Andre Rivas
was the assistant colorist on that.
So he's supporting those guys and what Sphere
Studios, because they built a studio specifically
to produce content for this this venue,
Sphere Studios built their own camera called the
Big Sky Camera, which had a fisheye lens on it to
be able to capture an 18K by 18K source image to
put into the into the sphere.
So, yeah, there was making sure that the color from
that camera was coming into base light correctly
and then developing the color profiles for the
venues so that when they project itself on the
screen, it had all the right colors.
And of course, we can't do so that the ultimately
the playback in that venue is a 16K
by 16K image at 60 frames per second.
So it's a huge amount of data
being thrown up on that screen.
Obviously, you can't color
correct that in real time.
So most of the time, Tim and the team were working
off of proxies just on a
standard Sony X310 monitor.
So again, the color calibration, making sure that
that monitor matched the color of the venue and
then also just dealing with the spherical mapping
to be able to look at the image in different ways
on that flat square to get an idea of what it would
look like when you're
surrounded by it in the sphere.
So, yeah, a lot of fun and
fun new challenges in that.
Wow, I can't imagine.
Just I just had this like image in my mind of them
just grading and looking at the sphere, just like
standing out there in, you know, Las Vegas on the
strip and with a little desk in front of them.
Yeah, we we we hope to get to that
point at some further down the road.
But also, you know, of course, that that the sphere
is now very much in demand.
There are U2 concerts in there.
They're playing the film regularly there.
So it's not unfortunately a space you can just kind
of take over for a few days and do what you want.
And it's it's a, you know, it's a live venue.
So, yeah, it's just
building the workflow around it.
It seems like something that belongs in Dubai.
It's just such a bizarre, such a bizarre thing.
Was it interesting to see in in life, in real life?
Like what what did it look like as a viewer?
Yeah, no, it's definitely it's a very immersive
environment, very unique.
You know, in some ways, it's an evolution of
previous dome projections like OmniMax.
IMAX have this.
They still do actually have an OmniMax, which is
basically IMAX film projected on a dome or, you
know, some planetariums will have
digital shows that they can project.
So in some ways, it's an evolution of that.
But because it's a LED wall, you know, there's no
optical artifacts or anything about
you have to deal with in projection.
It's just the light directly coming at you.
It's much higher dynamic range so it can get much
deeper blacks, much brighter whites.
And of course, the resolution is pretty insane.
So, yeah, when you're sitting in that venue and
it's completely filling your peripheral vision,
like any time the camera
moves, you feel like you're moving.
Yeah, it's just totally immersive that way.
And when you're yeah, when the so Postcard from Earth
has shots from all over the world and all
these different environments.
So, yeah, like when you're in the underwater
sequences and the waves are over your head and the
fish are down in front of you.
It really is, you know, much more immersive than a
traditional theatrical experience.
So it's really unique.
I'll definitely be heading to
check it out next time I'm over.
That's for sure. And you guys have a system that
can deal with that that large file.
Yeah. So, I mean, that
actually was nothing new for baselight.
We had always architected baselight to be kind
of resolution independent and we'd always, you
know, so whatever resolution image you could throw
at it, you know, we can't
promise how fast that it will be.
But it will at least, you
know, produce an image and work.
So, again, a lot of the real time
adjustments had to be done off proxies.
But, you know, there are 4K proxies.
So 4K is the proxy and 16K was
ultimately what was what was rendered.
Wow. I bet that took a
while to render, but it's OK.
You don't have to tell me how long.
Well, look, I reckon I've probably covered most of
most of the questions that I had for you.
But I just find it super interesting what you've
been able to do in your career and how much
everyday stuff that we take
for granted, you know, has actually been the result
of committees and companies
that you that you've worked in.
And I think really it's it's, you know, people who
are doing all of this work in the background to
make sure that things really
look the best that they can.
That gives us colorists the
ability to do what we do.
So I can't thank you enough for your contribution
to the craft and just for for being available and
having a chat and, you know,
being at the other end of the phone
support. It's it's awesome.
So thanks a lot. Well, thanks.
Yeah, that's really nice to hear. And yeah, like I
said, it's I if, you know, the creative process is
just able to go smooth and you
don't even think of that technology.
Then, you know, then we've won.
That's that's really our goal.
So yeah, it feels a bit like that in coloring, too.
It's like if no one notices what
we've done, then we've done a good job.
So we're very self-effacing in this field.
Yeah. Well, thank you so much.
Peter Postma, I'm Kayleigh Bateman from Mixing
Light, and I'll see you next time.