AMSTERDAM — Colorfront (www.colorfront.com), the developer of high-performance, on-set dailies and transcoding systems, showcased an expanded portfolio of affordable UHD HDR products at IBC2017. The brand new Colorfront HDR Image Analyzer joins Colorfront QC Player as the latest addition to a new generation of cost-competitive products aimed at post production and studio facilities needing to execute quality control and mastering tasks on Ultra High Definition (UHD), High Dynamic Range (HDR), Wide Color Gamut (WCG) content.
“More and more companies worldwide are retooling for 4K/UHD HDR mastering, but they rapidly discover the existing crop of hardware-based video monitoring/analysis solutions can be painfully expensive – with the bill racking up to multiple ten of thousands of dollars,” says Aron Jaszberenyi, managing director of Colorfront. “Consequently, there’s a lot of interest in Colorfront’s new solutions and, prior to launch, Colorfront HDR Image Analyzer has already been called ‘the future of the scope.’ Combined with Colorfront QC Player, users have a new generation of highly-affordable solutions delivering fast, broad and robust toolsets for essential image analysis and QC-verification tasks on UHD/HDR/WCG content.”
The Colorfront HDR Image Analyzer and Colorfront QC Player and are both powered by the Colorfront Engine to ensure color and metadata fidelity. Both harness powerful monitoring, analysis and validation tools that are featured in Colorfront’s flagship Transkoder.
Colorfront HDR Image Analyzer packages together waveform, histogram, vectorscope, split-screen, color gamut, nit light level and audio level metering, and error logging, and supports the very latest HDR standards – including HLG (Hybrid Log-Gamma), PQ (Perceptual Quantizer) and Rec.2020 on 4K/UHD content.
The Colorfront QC Player supports playback of JPEG 2000 content, including DCPs (2K/4K, encrypted, with subtitles) and IMF packages, such as lossless/high-bit-rate UHD Dolby Vision mezzanine masters with an IMSC1 subtitles, HDR 10plus dynamic metadata and integrated Dolby Vision remapping and external Dolby CMU control. It also delivers realtime support for all major RAW UHD HDR formats from the latest digital cinematography cameras. These include: Alexa ARRIRAW – both MXF-wrapped and .ARI files; Panasonic VariCam 4K VRAW and Panasonic AVC-Intra; Sony F55/F65 RAW, XAVC and Sony Venice X-OCN; Blackmagic DNG; Canon C200 RAW; Red R3D; Apple ProRes; plus 10/12/16-bit DPX and 16-bit TIF and Open EXR sequences from VFX or scanned content.
For essential UHD HDR image analysis tasks, QC Player includes waveform, vectorscope, histogram, split-screen, color gamut and nit light-level metering tools. It features framing guide overlays for title/text/logos/graphics safe areas, plus image reframing and burn-in/watermarking tools. QC Player also comes with audio tools supporting embedded audio, WAV files and up to 24-channel audio output.
Colorfront HDR Image Analyzer runs on a convenient 1RU form factor Supermicro server and leverages the GPU performance of the very latest Nvidia Quadro P4000 graphics cards for monitoring, with AJA’s Kona 4 HD-SDI I/O card supporting realtime input up to 4K/UHD.
Colorfront QC Player runs on Supermicro and HP Z840 workstations, leveraging GeForce 1080Ti or Nvidia Titan-XP graphics cards for monitoring purposes, with AJA’s Kona 4 I/O card supporting realtime output up to 4K at 60fps.
Colorfront QC Player is shipping now and is priced at $10,000, with an annual rental option of $5,000, both including support/updates and an upgrade path to the full Colorfront Transkoder license. Colorfront HDR Image Analyzer is set to ship later this year.