LOS ANGELES — Colorfront (www.colorfront.com), the developer of high-performance, on-set dailies and transcoding systems for motion pictures, high-end episodic TV and commercials, has launched Transkoder 2016 on Mac. The 4K-capable product harnesses the same advanced feature sets as the company’s PC-based Transkoder system, and broadens the product’s appeal as an HDR mastering solution for delivering Ultra High Definition (UHD) and High Dynamic Range (HDR) content.
Transkoder on Mac previewed at the SMPTE 2016 Annual Technical Conference in Hollywood, where the company also showcased the performance of its PC-based Transkoder 2016 Update 2, which supports 8K RAW material captured by the latest generation of digital cinematography cameras.
Colorfront Transkoder on Mac runs on the Mac Pro. With an attractive price tag, its key features include UHD video output, Dolby Vision mastering, digital cinema and IMF mastering, plus packaging, QC, analysis and validation tools.
One of the first customers with Colorfront Transkoder on Mac is Color A Go-Go, a digital color finishing and post-production studio, located in San Francisco. “We provide a full suite of HDR services – from consulting on project pre-production, production and post, through to grading and encoding support – for streamed content providers, such as Amazon and Netflix, as well as HDR digital theater releases in IMAX HDR and DCI HDR,” says Kim Salyer, co-founder and EP of Color A Go-Go. "We love Colorfront’s approach with the new, cost-effective Transkoder on Mac. It’s a deep product with a huge feature set, and believe it is a cornerstone that will be of immense value to our developing HDR business.”
Update 2 runs on the latest Supermicro workstation, fitted with Nvidia Pascal Titan-X and Quadro cards, plus AJA’s high-density Corvid 88 I/O card, providing multiple, independent HD-SDI outputs. Transkoder Update 2’s GPU processing power enables 8K, UHD dual independent video output, and simultaneous realtime views of dual independent masters in a variety of formats and color spaces. These include Transkoder’s capability to read, de-bayer, process and review RAW media from 8K cameras such as Red Helium and Panavision Millennium DXL.