LOS ANGELES — Colorfront (colorfront.com), the developer of high-performance dailies/transcoding systems, is showcasing Colorfront Express Dailies 2022 at Cine Gear Expo 2022 this week. Shipping this summer, Express Dailies 2022 is being shown running on the new Mac Studio M1 Ultra workstation, processing SDR/HDR footage simultaneously to Apple Pro Display XDR monitors. Thanks to engineering collaborations with Apple, Express Dailies 2022 leverages extreme performance from the latest Mac Studio for a broad array of accelerated acquisition, dailies and finishing tasks.
Express Dailies 2022 also features support for the latest digital cinematography camera formats, such as Arri Alexa 35 4.6K, Red V-Raptor 8K VV, Sony Venice 2 8.6K and Blackmagic Design 12K Raw. In addition, Colorfront has upgraded the color management capabilities of Express Dailies 2022 to embrace a new era of workflow operations and deliver a versatile option to help users streamline end-to-end, color-accurate workflows.
Express Dailies 2022 delivers full support for ACES 1.3, the latest Academy Color Encoding System, including ACES Metadata File (AMF), which is designed for greater flexibility when implementing ACES viewing pipelines. AMF – a sidecar XML file carrying the metadata recipe – enables the exchange of accurate, clip-level metadata between on-set, dailies and finishing processes. It contains a detailed pipeline description with all of the various input (IDT), output (ODT), look-modification (LMT) transforms that need to be applied to a clip to recreate the creative intent, plus the working color space and the version of ACES being used. The transport of AMFs via Express Dailies 2022 maintains consistent end-to-end color appearance, and secures an unambiguous archive of the creative intent.
“ACES AMF takes set-to-post workflow to another level by removing the guess-work of applying color pipeline and color decisions across multiple applications on multiple shots from different cameras,” explains Bruno Munger, Colorfront’s director of business development. “Having ACES AMF within Express Dailies 2022 gives users a supreme way to manage precise color communication between on-set and dailies, through to editorial, VFX and post production mastering, and extends the capabilities of Express Dailies 2022 to enable new and highly-efficient workflows.”
Collaborative technology innovations with Pomfort and Blackmagic Design also further streamline end-to-end color operations. In an on-going collaboration between Colorfront and Pomfort, a round-trip-workflow supporting Colorfront Engine has been implemented in Pomfort's Livegrade Studio on-set color grading system to enable the exchange of clip-level ACES AMF metadata and color descriptions in ACES viewing pipelines.
Additionally, after several months of beta-testing, Colorfront is showcasing a new Colorfront Engine plug-in for Blackmagic’s Davinci Resolve color grading/nonlinear editing system. The plug-in supports ACES AMF workflows, as well as the application of Colorfront Engine parametric looks and transforms during post operations, ensuring perceptually matching simultaneous SDR/HDR deliverables. LUA scripting in DaVinci Resolve can be used to apply looks to timelines containing multiple shots, while “blue fringe” problems from extremely bright/saturated objects, such as LED lights, are now properly handled with Colorfront Engine’s Perceptual Processing, along with the included Academy Reference Gamut Compression algorithm.