Enables pre-visualisation of images on electronic displays in colour accurate to final film or HD image
FilmLight, pioneers of digital film technology, announced today that the world’s leading visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a Lucasfilm Ltd. company, has purchased its Truelight colour management system.
The most advanced commercially-available colour management system, Truelight will enable ILM artists to understand how colours and tones will be reproduced in a final project – even if desktop monitors do not have the range to display them – and provides a full simulation of the entire workflow from digital data to the final projected image. By characterising each stage in the typical workflow, the closest possible match between preview and final image can be achieved.
Cliff Plumer, ILM’s Chief Technology Officer, explained, “Matching an image on a digital artist’s desktop monitor to the same image projected on a large screen has always been a challenge. Processing film for quality assurance is time consuming and expensive. Truelight essentially makes your computer monitor look like projected film. When you know that what you see on the screen is what you’re going to get in the final project, the turnaround time on production is much faster. The added time allows an artist to increase the quality of the final product. That’s why we brought in Truelight, and we’ve been impressed by its performance in testing so far.”
ILM had been developing a second-generation colour calibration system of its own, in-house, when ILM senior software engineer, Neil Robinson, saw Truelight. “I like the way Truelight has been engineered. While other commercial products constrain you to do just what the product wants you to, Truelight gives you a toolkit that lets you build exactly what you need. It’s amazingly flexible,” said Robinson. He added, “The quality is also impressive. We did a split screen match to test the Truelight output in our digital theatre – a film print vs. a digital simulation. It’s the best split screen match I’ve ever seen.”
ILM, one of the Truelight system’s first beta testers in the U.S., has purchased FilmLight’s HD/SDI hardware along with the integrated Truelight software, which will enable ILM artists to characterise the actual digital film pipeline being used on a production.
FilmLight commercial director, Peter Stothart, said, “ILM is taking full advantage of all of Truelight’s colour management capabilities for digital motion picture creation – software applications, HD hardware, software libraries, and measurement instruments. Because they have such a demanding environment, they’ve been fantastic beta testers and have contributed a lot to our development effort.” He added, “For a company like ILM, having the ability to build their own calibration profiles is critical. Other companies may not need – or want – that level of customisation, and prefer to use Truelight’s calibration profiles right out of the box. Truelight can be as simple or as complex as the application requires.”
Contact – Deepa Parbhoo ([email protected]) +44 20 7292 0400
