NEWS
Insider Grading:
FilmLight's Baselight Eight
by Debra Kaufman
 FilmLight's Baselight Eight. |
In mid-July, FilmLight Ltd, the company known for the Northlight scanner, Baselight color grader and the Truelight color management system, demonstrated 4K color grading on its Baselight Eight color corrector. Thanks to an upgrade to Baselight’s GPU processor that speeds up processing tenfold, this upgrade enables the system to process multiple streams of 4K in real time.
With FilmLight owner Steve Chapman in attendance, Jacqui Loran (head of European support), Mike Grieve (worldwide sales director), Peter Postma (TrueLight product manager), Michael La Fuente (Baselight manager) and Avid’s application editor Steve Hollyhead demonstrated what the Baselight Eight will be able to do when it becomes available in October.
Most notably, La Fuente demonstrated the Baselight Eight handling up to 43 layers in real time at 4K. “What we’re showing here is the limits of the suite in real time,” said La Fuente, who indicated that any layer could be pulled out and adjusted and replaced in the stack. “I can keep piling on the layers and it won’t slow down. What you’re looking at is the most powerful color corrector there is. It’s displaying, working with and storing images in 4K in real time with no proxies.”
The use of the GPU processor has gained a lot of traction in the last few years. In this upgrade, FilmLight added the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics processing units to the Baselight Eight. Up until now, graphics cards had been used only for viewing images but not working on them. “While they were fast, the results could not be read back into the computer memory fast enough,” explained FilmLight’s Chapman. “The new cards and the ingenuity of our engineering team have overcome that obstacle and allowed us to make a leap forward in performance.”
According to Chapman, the upgrade will be available for all Baselight products. Baselight Eight systems will be upgraded with eight GPU cards, each one containing 128 general purpose floating point processor units for a total of 1024. Baselight Four systems will be upgraded with four GPU cards. Baselight One-E, One-S and HD units will be upgraded with one card. The GPU went into beta testing in August at several facilities.
“It’s going to make a big difference–– not just for DIs but also for work on commercials and other deadline-driven projects,” said La Fuente. The Baselight Eight 4K DI grade has already been used on three or four sessions focused on commercials, as well as an independent film.
The importance of being able to color correct in high resolution in real time is underscored by the advent of higher-resolution cameras. If a project is acquired in 4K resolution (with, for example, a Dalsa or Red camera), Baselight Eight can import and store footage that has been de-Bayered into DPX files. In one project shown, the footage was shot on the Dalsa, recorded to Codex Digital, with QuickTimes generated to Final Cut Pro, which were then used to conform. “When it came time for color correction, the material was de-Bayered, and there was a little bit of color science to get it into DPX files,” said Grieve. “But the people involved were surprised it wasn’t harder.”
Usually the trade-off for color correcting in high resolution is speed, but with the Baselight Eight, DI artists can use any of the standard Baselight color grading tools, in real time, in 4K resolution with no slow-down. The version shown at FilmLight’s Los Angeles headquarters was working with 18 CPUs (36 cores with 96 TB of useable storage).
Also significant was FilmLight’s debut of Avid integration with Baselight, which allows an Avid Media Composer editor and Baselight color corrector to work with the same media off a shared storage device (Avid Unity). With this important move, the color correction suite is no longer an “island” in the post-production workflow, but is fully integrated into the post process. This opens the door to a nonlinear, collaborative process between editorial and color correction, freeing creatives (and the production) from a set of discrete processes.
 The Blackboard control panel for all Baselight models. |
A new feature also improves the speed of the conform process by enabling the user to easily filter images by UID (user identifier for Linux systems), timecode or keycode and automatically find the correct image for the conform. “We were getting so many calls about conform issues that we had to help users sort it out,” said Loran. “We’ve shown this to people with lots of conform issues and they’ve told us it’s a godsend. What’s clever about it is that there are different versions of conform and I get to pick what is right for me. For a data-centric show, this will save a lot of time. It’s file management for a digital world.”
Avid’s Hollyhead and Loran also demonstrated the interchangeability of bi-directional metadata ex-change between the Media Composer and Baselight via Unity.
Finally, FilmLight’s Postma demonstrated another up-and-coming technology of interest: 3-D color grading with the Baselight. He showed a timeline with two HD streams, showing left and right eyes simultaneously. “If I want to do a color correction, it gangs the two eyes together so if I apply a hue shift, you watch the color correction on both eyes,” he said. “Or, for those who prefer to grade one eye at a time, they have that option.”
Other 3-D tools include the ability to increase or decrease the amount of depth perception (or convergence), a keystone correction tool that will allow the adjustment of the two lenses, and another tool for offset of HD cameras. “There aren’t a lot of 3-D movies going through post now,” said Postma. “But we want to make sure that we’re ready so our customers can keep up with the changes.”
The 3-D tools are a software upgrade, and will be provided free of charge to Baselight users on support. The software will be available shortly after the IBC show in September.
Debra Kaufman is a freelance writer who is also West Coast Editor of Film & Video Magazine and Editor of DI Studio, an online newsletter on digital intermediates. She can be reached at dkla@ca.rr.com.
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