control, creativity, confidence and collaboration is baselight 5.3

New features developed to promote control, creativity, confidence and collaboration

FilmLight today announced Baselight 5.3, the latest release of the company’s renowned colour grading platform.

This release includes many improvements to boost control throughout the grading process, such as Partial Conform and T-CAM v2, with even more new features that keep the system at the cutting edge of creativity, including Lens Distortion and an expanded Look Library. New features to improve confidence and collaboration with other departments are also included, such as improved trackers, wildcards for sequence versioning, improved export facilities, and more.

Conform

Baselight 5.3’s powerful Partial Conform feature allows you to conform new media to existing shots in the timeline, so you can piece together complex conforms by loading a single edit list and then conform parts separately using different criteria. Combined with the robust filtering in Shots View, it provides a much faster way to update media for multiple shots.

Input/sequence versioning, introduced in a previous release, provides massive time savings in quick-turnaround VFX jobs where new versions are constantly arriving. And with Baselight 5.3, you have even more flexibility with the introduction of wildcards. Wildcards allow you to work with versions within date folders, or with more complex file and folder naming strategies. Baselight can even detect dates automatically.

Colour

Baselight 5.3 sees the introduction of a new release of T-CAM, FilmLight’s display rendering transforms based on emulating human perception. T-CAM v2 improves appearance matching between viewing conditions, provides better shadow definition and improved skin tones, and minimises noise in underexposed images.

The new Lens Distortion feature allows you to correct – or apply – lens distortion based on analysis of the image or by using presets for common industry lenses. This is useful for preparing plates for VFX, but it can also be used for creative grading effects too.

And if you need to perform operations like tracking or Paint on distorted plates, you can place any Baselight grading stack in a Lens Distortion ‘sandwich’ to modify the undistorted image before re-applying the distortion.

The new LUT operator allows you to set input and output colour spaces for each LUT. You can also apply LUTs embedded in ARRI and RED camera files, and even use Baselight’s Media Import Rules so that this happens automatically whenever you add these types of camera file to your timeline.

We’ve also expanded the Baselight Look Library, adding ENR and other classic film and digital looks that preserve dynamic range for modern scene-referred and HDR workflows.

A host of other improvements have been made to colour control throughout Baselight, including the new Gamut Alarm, which allows you to pin-point out-of-gamut colours based on your current settings, and the Processing Format functionality, where you can specify that all image processing happens at the working format resolution for consistent results with spatial shaders and OFX plugins that behave differently when applied to different image resolutions.

Efficiency

Baselight 5.3 takes Baselight’s already powerful trackers and improves on them even more. Featuring a simplified user interface, all trackers allow you to create planes separately and easily reuse them, enter custom names for easy identification, and filter motion data for the smoothest track possible.

Baselight 5.3 also introduces web browser-based system management. Access system administration information directly via a browser, where you can view and amend jobs, the operations queue, licences, diagnostic information and more. The web interface is built using the FilmLight API, the new programming interface to Baselight and Daylight designed to automate otherwise time-consuming tasks.

ARRIRAW MXF files are now trimmed – either during Consolidate or copying via FLUX Manage – to create new MXF files, retaining any audio tracks in the source media. This includes ARRI MXF files that use Apple ProRes.

Delivery

Baselight’s powerful export functionality for reports, LUTs and other metadata has also been boosted. An improved UI makes batch export file naming easy, and the new Export Preview allows you to view a list of the files that will be created. All exports are now processed in the Operations Queue, too, so you can export without locking the user interface, or process exports on another system such as a FLUX Store.

In this latest release, Baselight also introduces hardware-accelerated H.264 and HEVC encoding, and native support for non-Latin text – such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean – throughout the application, in filenames, metadata, counters, burnins and even in PDF reports.

The latest release is available to download now on the FilmLight web site for existing clients. Beta releases of Daylight 5.3 and Baselight Editions 5.3 are also available on request for interoperability with Baselight 5.3.

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What next big thing we need in color grading softwares?

Blog for the color grading software developers - Assimilate Scratch, Baselight and Davinci Resolve.

1- ROTOBRUSH TOOL FROM ADOBE AFTEREFFECTS.

2- PF TRACK /MOCHA TRACKING

3- SIMPLE COLORIZE TOOL OF ADOBE PHOTOSHOP

NOTE - VIDEO USED IN THE BOLG IS JUST FOR DEMO PURPOSE.

PRELIGHT - Free on set color grading tool from Filmlight

FilmLight introduces Prelight, a freely licensed Mac OS X application designed to help DoPs and other professional creatives to author and review looks in pre-production and on-set.

Prelight’s simple-to-operate interface makes it a breeze to check how shots appear with looks or LUTs applied, and to import or add grading decisions that can be passed downstream. Images can be imported from almost any camera, and graded references exported in almost any format.

“What makes Prelight special is that it incorporates the full Truelight Colour Space technology you find in other FilmLight products,” said Peter Postma, Managing Director, FilmLight Americas. “So regardless of the camera, whether RAW or monitoring output, whether HDR or laptop screen, looks are applied consistently and grading decisions remain relevant even for final delivery.”

Prelight complements the FilmLight products FLIP and Daylight, which already provide full on-set and near-set grading capabilities. Many directors, working with a colourist early on or not, would just like more control over how the shot is going to look, and to be able to communicate that easily and visually to post-production.

The creative team can enhance the grade with simple but familiar tools, to create new reference stills as well as 3D LUTs or BLG (Baselight Linked Grade) files. With the render-free BLG workflow, the grades are non-destructive too: additional BLG metadata is created and attached to the stills. And the free licence for Baselight for Avid or NUKE, which makes it free to read and render BLG files, makes this workflow available to productions on any budget.

An extended licence can be purchased so that when these files arrive in the Baselight post house, or on a Daylight system for near-set dailies, the metadata is attached automatically and the BLG file becomes the basis of the grade, which can then be refined right up to the moment the deliverables are created. The additional licence also includes enhanced logging and monitoring capabilities.

As well as fitting in naturally with the BLG workflow, Prelight can fit into any post-production workflow because of the ability to export standard ASC CDL lists and third-party formatted 3D LUTs.

Integration with cameras, such as the ARRI Alexa SXT, means that Prelight can simplify the colour workflow dramatically by enabling fully automated metadata support all the way from the start of the production chain. Prelight can also interface to the majority of professional LUT boxes or monitors for real-time viewing.

“The production and post-production community is looking for ways to customise their workflows to guarantee the best scope for creativity,” Postma added. “Prelight is another exciting option to give simple but direct and reliable control. We are happy to offer the core features of Prelight, including the full grading and LUT toolkit, free, with very low cost options for connectivity and advanced metadata export.”