RANCHO MIRAGE, CA — Colorfront (www.colorfront.com), the developer of high-performance dailies and transcoding systems, is showcasing the abilities of its products to enable color-consistent 4K/6K/8K SDR/HDR acquisition-to-post workflows during the 2020 HPA Tech Retreat, taking place this week. The company also participated in the cloud-based, live production of The Lost Lederhosen short film, and shared details of its role in the making of this mini-movie during the Retreat’s “HPA Makes A Movie” Supersession.
In the Retreat’s Innovation Zone, Colorfront demonstrated the 2020 versions of its Express Dailies and Transkoder systems running on the new Mac Pro and feeding dual Apple 32-inch Retina Pro XDR displays – one showing a 6K HDR GUI, the second being used for 6K HDR video monitoring. Express Dailies and Transkoder 2020 both incorporate Colorfront Engine perceptual color-processing pipeline tools, and both support 6K HDR/SDR, ACES-compliant workflow, along with the very latest camera and editorial formats.
At Colorfront’s booth in the Innovation Zone, the company showcased a DIT cart with Express Dailies 2020 on the new Mac Pro, working in combination with AJA FS-HDR, Pomfort LiveGrade and Blackmagic Resolve. The DIT cart fed a Sony X310 4K HDR video monitor and showed a color-managed, end-to-end workflow, from on-set, to dailies and final grading using Colorfront Engine.
Transkoder 2020 was shown running on a Supermicro workstation with four Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPUs and a AJA Kona 5 video card outputting to an 85-inch Sony Z9G 8K HDR monitor. The new AJA HDR Image Analyzer 12G, developed in partnership with Colorfront, offers 8K HDR waveform, histogram and vectorscope monitoring.
The live, cloud-based production and post of the short film The Lost Lederhosen, and the subsequent screening of the final movie during the Supersession, was organized by Joachim Zell, VP of technology at Efilm. The Lost Lederhosen puts the spotlight on production and post production workflows that have not been seen before. Fifteen of the film’s 20 scenes were shot in advance in Los Angeles, using an array of cameras – including Sony Venice, Arri Alexa, Red Monstro, Panavision DXL, Blackmagic Ursa 4.6K G2 and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. The final five scenes were shot on a train set built in the conference center, after which the film was post-produced in ACES in near realtime during the Retreat.
Colorfront’s role during the production has been to streamline the 4K/6K/8K HDR/SDR dailies and metadata from all the different cameras involved. Colorfront’s newly developed, cloud-based integration with Frame.io makes it possible to stream color-consistent camera log HEVC proxy files directly from Frame.io.
Colorfront uploaded all camera originals to S3 storage in AWS; provided sound sync color graded dailies for viewing and editorial; delivered 2K, 4K and 8K OpenEXR format in ACES AP0 with camera and lens metadata for VFX and color-grading collaborators on the project. Colorfront's new Parametric LMT brought the full capabilities of the Colorfront Engine's color processing into a full ACES compliant pipeline. This allowed the seamless integration of a wide variety of cameras and extreme lighting with simple CDL adjustments.