Colorfront Opens a New Chapter in Color Tools For Cinema & Television

IBC 2024, Amsterdam – Colorfront (colorfront.com), the multi-award-winning developer of high-performance dailies/transcoding/streaming systems for motion pictures, OTT, broadcast and commercials – has opened a new chapter in SDR/HDR color workflows with a multitude of new tools that dramatically augment its already abundant feature-set for cinema and television mastering.

These latest cutting-edge capabilities harness Colorfront’s expertise in the art and science of color fidelity, and spring from solving real-world challenges faced by customers – all to be unveiled at IBC 2024 in Amsterdam.

The new tools are powered by Colorfront Engine, the state-of-the-art color-volume remapper which uses the Human Perceptual Model for multiple-display mastering, while maintaining the original creative intent, and which features in Colorfront’s Transkoder, On-Set Dailies/Express Dailies products.

Not only do Colorfront’s new SDR/HDR color tools deliver the guarantee of color accuracy, they also variously eliminate awkward workarounds and open fresh opportunities for customers to work with emerging industry standards, streamlining speed and efficiency.

SDR to Dolby Vision round-tripping
The SDR to Dolby Vision round-trip tool transitions SDR to visually-stunning Dolby Vision HDR, and produces unique Dolby Vision XML metadata, guaranteeing that the Dolby-derived SDR output visually-matches the original SDR content. This innovative method presents a unified, streamlined, single-source workflow for mastering and distribution, enabling content owners to leverage their catalogs of film and TV programming. The SDR to Dolby Vision feature is also available in AJA’s ColorBox.

An example of the unique SDR to Dolby Vision round-trip workflow experience was the conversion of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023) from standard 4K SDR to Dolby Vision 4K HDR by Transkoder for streaming on Disney+.

Earlier this year, Cricket Lane Post, the LA-based post-production services company specializing in unscripted content, also used the new tool in Transkoder in to convert all episodes of Welcome To Wrexham – Season 3 (Disney/Hulu) from final graded SDR to Dolby Vision HDR.

"We chose Transkoder's SDR to Dolby Vision tool as it was by far the most efficient way for the Cricket Lane Post team to generate a great-looking HDR version of the show while maintaining the original creative intent across all versions,” said Aaron Lovell, EVP post production at Cricket Lane Post.

DCI to Dolby Vision conversion
Matching the capabilities of the SDR to Dolby Vision tool, the DCI to Dolby Vision tool in Transkoder focuses on transforming XYZ cinema master content, designed for 48-nit theatrical content, into Dolby Vision HDR for home video. This tool preserves the original creative intent and simultaneously produces a Dolby Vision master with corresponding metadata.

HDR Cinema delivery
With the proliferation of HDR cinema technology, including projectors and emissive displays, there is growing demand for tools that can efficiently produce additional deliverables, but without adding significant hours to the color grading process. No matter the hero grade, the new HDR Cinema tool manages the conversions for any required cinema deliverables. Colorfront also supports the latest the Digital Cinema Initiatives specifications for High Dynamic Range D-Cinema, meaning that HDR DCPs created in Transkoder meet the DCI standard for HDR content.

HDR Roll-off
Using Transkoder’s new HDR Roll-off tool, users can easily roll-off the highlights in HDR content, using controls to manage peak luminance and the softness of the roll-off curve. The roll-off is performed in the perceptual color engine to maintain the creative intent. This new feature will prove especially powerful in creating highlight-managed deliverables for emerging HDR exhibition technologies, including Barco’s Lightsteering projection.

HDR Harmony
HDR Harmony is specially-designed to correct overly-bright and saturated and/or out of spec HDR content. Leveraging Colorfront Engine’s perceptual image-processing, it protects against color artifacts and highlight clipping, resulting in a cleaner displayed image.

Broadcast Converter tools
The Broadcast Converter tools deliver a set of optimized controls to manage broadcast-based display-referred conversions between SDR, HDR PQ and HDR HLG. The Broadcast Converter Advanced tool builds on the standard Broadcast Converter, with an added softness control for SDR source images, plus support for BT2408.

HDR Brightness Guard
Some HDR content can be visually-disturbing when large areas of the image are overly-bright, such as large titles. With the HDR Brightness Guard, users can quickly identify the shots in their timeline that may contain large blocks of overly-bright highlights, by setting the brightness warning to a custom nit value. Markers are automatically generated on the timeline, allowing for quick and easy navigation to the relevant shots for review and the potential application of different conversion settings.

Subtitle Detection
When converting from SDR to HDR, burned-in subtitles can often be much brighter than desired in HDR. Transkoder’s Subtitle Detection tool enables users to detect the subtitles and adjust their brightness independently of the background image, for an optimal HDR master.

“The new SDR/HDR color tools in Colorfront products will prove extremely useful in cinema and TV mastering workflows,” said Aron Jaszberenyi, MD of Colorfront. “It’s exciting to see customers, in large and boutique facilities alike, already using the SDR to Dolby Vision tool to expedite their Dolby Vision deliverables, and users will really appreciate the opportunities and time-saving advantages our additional tools will bring.”

About Colorfront: Colorfront is headquartered in Budapest, Hungary, with offices in Los Angeles, plus sales partners worldwide. The company's popular, award-winning on-set dailies and transcoding systems are utilized by small, medium and large companies alike, to process and deliver media for Hollywood blockbusters, high-end episodic TV and OTT internet entertainment. The firm was founded in 2000 by Mark and Aron Jaszberenyi, who were instrumental in the advent of non-linear DI color grading. Combining in-depth expertise in image color science with a pedigree in cutting-edge software development, the company's R&D team earned an Academy Award in 2010 for Lustre, Autodesk's DI grading system, and a Primetime Engineering Emmy in 2012 for Colorfront On-Set Dailies. Colorfront has since become renowned for the innovation, excellence and performance of its camera-to-post products, which include On-Set Dailies, Express Dailies and Transkoder. The company has leveraged its technology to successfully offer Colorfront Cloud Services, and also owns and operates a state-of-the-art DI and post-production facility, of the same name, in Budapest. colorfront.com