COLORFRONT UPDATES TRANSKODER FOR IBC 2016

Versatile tools and extreme performance put Transkoder even further ahead as the ultimate HDR mastering solution

Budapest, Hungary, Sept 8th, 2016 – Colorfront (www.colorfront.com), the Academy and Emmy Award-winning developer of high-performance, on-set dailies and transcoding systems for motion pictures, high-end episodic TV and commercials, will showcase how its Transkoder 2016 continues its phenomenal technological advancements by streamlining delivery of the diverse formats in Ultra High Definition (UHD) and High Dynamic Range (HDR) production, during showcase sessions at IBC 2016, Amsterdam, 9-13 Sept (Okura Hotel), and at the partner booth of Panasonic (Hall 11, Stand C45).

Colorfront products are renowned for pushing the boundaries of what is possible and continually exceeds industry demand for more extensive toolsets and faster processing. The company continues to blaze a trail with an array of innovations in Transkoder 2016, the high-performance mastering system, that bring greater flexibility to manage the latest UHD, HDR camera, color, editorial and deliverables formats used in digital cinema, high-end episodic TV and OTT internet entertainment.

The latest updates combine to make Transkoder 2016 the ultimate, next-generation HDR mastering and HDR QC system, capable of covering the widest range of delivery formats including: Dolby Vision, HDR10, to HLG 1.2, conforming to the latest SMPTE 2094-xx delivery standards, along with industry-leading metadata management on HDR and WCG color transforms, plus support for the newest camera and latest production mezzanine formats.

"Roundabout provides many delivery services, including being an official Amazon QC house, and we simply must have the best, most efficient tools to fulfil the wide variety of our client needs," said Michael Smollin, DI colorist at Roundabout in Burbank, California. "In every respect, Colorfront Transkoder does what we need, and we always feel it keeps us at the cutting-edge of the industry thanks to Colofront’s non-stop R&D."

Running on the latest Supermicro and HP workstations, Transkoder leverages the extreme performance of AJA’s high-density Corvid 88 I/O card to support multiple, independent HD-SDI outputs, including 8K dual-green and 16x SDI 8K output, dual independent UHD video outputs, or simultaneous real-time views of UHD HDR and HD HDR/SDR masters in a variety of formats and color spaces.

For monitoring, Transkoder 2016 harnesses cutting-edge GPU performance of the latest graphic cards, including NVidia’s Tesla M60, Quadro M6000, Titan-X(p) and GTX 1080 cards. Colorfront is also showing 40Gb accelerated networking between workstations, offering high-speed remote media access at over 4GB/s per workstation.

Significant improvements have been made to Transkoder’s built-in video/audio diagnostic tools with ultra precision monitoring of UHD/HDR/WCG signals, and the display of Rec2020/P3/HD709 color space graticules, pixel analyzers, and more detailed waveform of light level readouts, from PQ and HLG encodings. For broadcast workflow environments Transkoder introduces a more powerful conform toolset, search capabilities on media drives and remote stores, template-based auto editing of black, bars & tones, slates, and alpha compositing for logo burn-ins and titles.

Colorfront will demonstrate Transkoder’s industry-leading capability to read, de-Bayer, process, and review 8K RAW media, from 8K cameras such as RED Helium and Panavision Millennium Digital XL, and encode mezzanine and broadcast deliverables, including support for Panasonic’s 8K Super Hi-Vision P2 recorder. Transkoder builds on the industry leading success of Colorfront’s On-Set Dailies, providing unmatched support for all leading digital cinematography camera formats, from ARRI, Sony, Panasonic, Canon, RED, Panavision, Phantom, etc.

Transkoder 2016 already leads the market in IMF (Interoperable Master Format) mastering and its capabilities have been further extended with the integration of Netflix’s Photon validation tool, providing a simple standardized interface to completely validate an IMP. Colorfront has made further enhancements to its own IMP and DCP validation tools, including essence descriptors and full HDR metadata support in IMF CPLs, MCA (multi-channel audio) labeling and OPL support. Transkoder delivers frame-accurate playback, transcoding, trans-wrapping and QC-ing of any IMF packages, with robust closed-caption and subtitle language support, plus blazing fast, parallel invisible, forensic watermarking of transcoded media via Civolution NexGuard.

All Colorfront products already support end-to-end HDR workflows, with full ACES capability, and Transkoder 2016 further improves HDR mastering productivity with additional toolsets enabling HDR metadata inspection, mastering and QC, the super-fast generation of light level statistics, as well as support for the latest HDR formats, including Dolby Vision packages with Dolby CMU (Content Mapping Unit) control. Transkoder also supports concurrent SDR/HDR mastering, plus light-level conversion between different brightness targets, via Colorfront Engine.

Colorfront continues to pioneer in cloud-based computing and will showcase the latest advances in optimized, scalable dailies and transcoding solutions running on the latest Google Cloud Platform and Amazon AWS.

"Transkoder is a reliable, high-performance digital file-conversion workhorse, that takes the away the pain of snowflake workflows," said Aron Jaszberenyi, managing director of Colorfront. "It keeps pace with the latest advances in CPU/GPU performance, supports the latest high-end camera and deliverable formats, and is regularly enhanced with new capabilities and improvements to the user-experience. Whatever comes its way - UHD, HDR, HFR, or the multitude of DCP and IMF deliverables, it really doesn't matter – Transkoder handles it all."

Transkoder customers include Sony, Disney, Fox, Fotokem, Deluxe, EFILM, Technicolor, Light Iron, Netflix, Amazon, BBC, NHK, Televisa, Final Frame, The Foundation, Point 360, Roundabout, Arsenal, Chainsaw, and the Picture Shop.

About Colorfront:
Colorfront, based in Budapest, Hungary, is one of Europe’s leading post production facilities. The company was founded by brothers Mark and Aron Jaszberenyi, who together played a pivotal role in the emergence of non-linear DI. The company’s R&D team earned an Academy Award for the development of Lustre, Autodesk’s DI grading system, and a Primetime Engineering Emmy for the Colofront On-Set Dailies. Combining this in-depth expertise with a pedigree in the development of additional cutting-edge software, Colorfront offers today’s most advanced technologies for scanning and recording, DI grading, conforming, digital dailies, VFX, online and offline editing, cinema sound mixing, mastering and deliverables. For further information please visit www.colorfront.com.

For more information:
Ron Prince, Prince PR
Email: ronny@princepr.com
Tel: +44 7802 447 484