At IBC 2004, FilmLight, pioneers of digital film technology, announced today the next generation of its Baselight colour grading systems, Baselight Four and Baselight Eight. The new releases combine software-based flexibility with a brand new scaleable, super-high bandwidth image processing system, delivering the ability for 4K colour grading in real time. FilmLight also announced that the Baselight range will now be available with a video I/O capability – bringing the power and creativity of the product to the video post-production market and enabling straightforward creation of multiple deliverables.

Price/performance options to suit film and video applications

With support for real-time grading of 4K streams or multiple 2K streams that enables instant review and approval for an attending DoP, Baselight Eight is designed as a “hero suite” for high-end film grading applications. Baselight Four, with dual/single link HD/SD SDI ingest and playout, is ideally suited as a grading system for HDTV applications. As with the current Baselight product, the new Baselight systems include FilmLight’s acclaimed Truelight 3D colour management system, ensuring accurate emulation of the final deliverable on the electronic grading display.

Hardware-enabled power, software-driven flexibility

By utilising industry standard PC hardware, the Linux OS, and an open architecture, the Baselight hardware subsystem provides an economic and highly flexible platform, able to benefit from the rapid advances in disk, graphics and processor technology. Unlike other parallel processing platforms, the multi-node Baselight architecture provides true parallel operation of all hardware components. The internal file system is able to utilise a very high I/O bandwidth as each node has its own directly connected RAID. Externally the file system appears as a standard NFS to enable network connectivity.

Peter Stothart, Commercial Director, FilmLight comments, “Until now, facilities had to choose between the power of hardware-based grading systems and the flexibility of software. Now, Baselight Four and Eight provide the best of both worlds – the rapid and continual addition of new software capabilities combined with the speed that top colourists and DoP’s need for instant results during their sessions. The additional support for multiple I/O options takes that flexibility up even further, giving facilities a hybrid solution offering speed that just isn’t available from any other grading system.”

Availability

Baselight, Baselight Four and Baselight Eight systems are currently available for purchase. System pricing starts at $160,000 USMSRP (130,000 Euros).

Contact – Deepa Parbhoo ([email protected]) +44 20 7292 0400

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