News: Colorfront Debuts New Color Engine At NAB 2014

(Las Vegas, Nevada--April 9, 2014) Colorfront, the Academy and Emmy Award-winning developer of high-performance, on-set dailies and transcoding systems for motion picture, high-end episodic HDTV and commercials production, today announced Colorfront Engine, a state-of-the art, managed color pipeline, which enables creative on-set look creation and ensures the vital color integrity of digital materials from camera-to-post. Colorfront Engine incorporates major color science breakthroughs, and makes its debut at NAB 2014, Las Vegas.

Colorfront Engine is designed by Colorfront's Academy Award-winning CTO Bill Feightner and Academy Award-winning lead engineer Tamas Perlaki. It has been integrated into all Colorfront tools and services, and supports the end-to-end management of color workflow – from live camera grading with On-Set Live, to Colorfront's award-winning, industry-leading dailies systems On-Set Dailies (OSD) and Express Dailies (ExD), the brand new OSD Transkoder option for VFX and DI conform and mastering, and also with Colorfront Cloud Services.

"Look creation, color integrity and the safe management of vital metadata are among the biggest issues facing cinematographers and post houses today,"said Bill Feightner, CTO of Colorfront. "Colorfront Engine provides a set of powerful and familiar 'look creation' tools, while also delivering new features to ensure the fidelity of color science and unity of metadata though the entire chain from camera-to-post, plus the many deliverables along the way."

The Colorfront Engine pipeline now represents the new default standard in all Colorfront applications, from On-Set Live Grading, through Dailies, conform and mastering. It is a fully ACES-compatible, deep color pipeline, with leading color management unifying all digital camera formats, and providing precision color-grading toolsets and mastering capabilities. It also supports 10- and 12-bit professional HD-SDI and HDMI video playback and HD/UltraHD/4K monitoring, with multi-channel embedded audio.

Highlights of Colorfront Engine:

• Display Calibration Toolset: with X-Rite i1 Pro and i1 Display Pro, to measure, calibrate and check computer displays, broadcast monitors, projectors and iPads.


• Camera Color: a new and innovative color toolset, based on real-world, camera-centric, unified color grading for all cameras, with features that cinematographers are familiar with, such as precise exposure, color temperature controls, and auto white-balance.


• Look Blender: the novel and powerful Colorfront Look Blender, exclusively part of Colorfront Engine, allows the creative mixing of mastering looks, to arrive at a unique color character, while protecting the deep color integrity of the master material. Whether it is the newest Master Look, a film print emulation, print bleach simulation, vintage film look, or ACES RRT, Look Blender allows the blending of multiple looks for the desired look for each project.


• Master Looks: a Colorfront exclusive technology that renders color in the best possible way, for mastering in HD, UltraHD and Digital Cinema formats. Master Looks includes color transforms that are specially-designed for the mastering of the latest digital cameras, capturing the widest latitude and color gamut, and mapping these for mastering to a wide range of standards, such as Rec709, DCI P3, Rec2020 and ACES. Master Looks works with all the latest 4K digital cinematography cameras, and helps to unify all camera formats in a practical and powerful way to help filmmakers realize their creative visions.


• HDR Mastering: the Colorfront Engine allows mastering for High Dynamic Range displays, providing the best-possible look on HDR devices, including Dolby Vision. The 32-bit per-channel floating-point precision of the Colorfront Engine protects color detail and picture quality when mastering to the latest high-luminance and wide-color-gamut displays.


• Colorfront UltraScaler: using leading-edge Colorfront image-science, HD media can be quickly up-rezzed to UltraHD or 4K with the very highest quality results. Utilizing the power of Colorfront's GPU processing, UltraScaler achieves superb detail and sharpness control for the ultimate in mastered picture quality.
• Dynamic Expander: takes the normal color and dynamic range, and can expand those for larger color space / higher dynamic range, remastering for the latest display technologies material in existing, normal color – such as UltraHD/4K Rec2020 and P3.


• Image analysis tools: also included are a range of essential image analysis tools including: waveform, vector, 3D color and histogram: PSNR (peak-signal-to-noise) readouts of deliverables; split/AB/difference comparisons of original and rendered footage: selectable scaling, in camera F-stops: and the ability to work with HDR images.

About Colorfront:
About Colorfront: Colorfront, based in Budapest, Hungary, is one of Europe's leading DI and post production facilities. The company was founded by brothers Mark and Aron Jaszberenyi, who together played a pivotal role in the emergence of non-linear DI. The company's R&D team earned an Academy Award for the development of Lustre, Autodesk's DI grading system, and a Primetime Engineering Emmy for the Colofront On-Set Dailies. Combining this in-depth expertise with a pedigree in the development of additional cutting-edge software, Colorfront offers today's most advanced technologies for scanning and recording, DI grading, conforming, digital dailies, VFX, online and offline editing, cinema sound mixing, mastering and deliverables. For further information please visit http://www.colorfront.com.

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