COLORFRONT PLUGS INTO NUKE

Colorfront state-of-the-art color tools deliver image-integrity for Nuke VFX artists

Budapest, August 17, 2015 – Colorfront (www.colorfront.com), the Academy and Emmy Award-winning winning developer of high-performance, on-set dailies and transcoding systems for motion pictures, high-end episodic TV and commercials, debuted Colorfront Engine for Nuke – a new, integrated, image-processing workflow with color transformation plug-in tools for The Foundry’s Nuke and Nuke Studio visual effects (VFX) compositing systems – during SIGGRAPH 2015 in Los Angeles, August 11- 13, (Colorfront booth #210).

Colorfront Engine for Nuke, already in use at leading VFX houses WETA and ILM, streamlines image integrity from the set into VFX post production by enabling Nuke artists to ingest RAW camera material and to apply the same grades and looks to their VFX work as the ones previously applied to live-action dailies.

Being able to work in-context brings new levels of consistency, efficiency and speed during the lifecycle of VFX production. VFX artists can, if necessary, make adjustments, or create brand new looks, using a set of powerful image and color processing plug-ins within Colorfront Engine for Nuke, and round-trip the associated metadata to production and editorial without needing to render media.

This simple, effective bi-directional workflow is facilitated by Colorfront Express Metadata (EMD) files, containing metadata and color grades, which are easily exported/imported from Colorfront dailies and transcoding systems into Nuke scenes and vice versa. In practice, VFX artists can import the entire processing pipeline from Colorfront Express Dailies, On-Set Dailies and Transkoder systems, and apply the associated image-processing and color transform metadata to RAW materials within Nuke.

Colorfront has worked closely with The Foundry to natively implement Colorfront Engine for Nuke via the Foundry’s Blink API. All of the tools are easy to access using Nuke's familiar node-based user-interface, and all parameters can be manipulated, animated and scripted to support a more complex VFX creation. This tight integration also offers a range of CPU and GPU-accelerated processing options to leverage the best possible hardware performance.

The range of plug-ins within Colorfront Engine for Nuke features Colorfront’s renowned ARRIRAW deBayering, which provides the highest-quality demosaicing on the market for all ARRI Alexa cameras, as well as ASA, tint, color temperature and sharpening adjustment options, helping to improve the quality of greenscreen and bluescreen shots and simplify the VFX compositing process.

Also included are colorspace conversion tools, creative primary and sector color grading tools, with grain and skintone enhancement, plus an Ultrascaler to support image resizing. Colorfront Engine for Nuke is fully-ACES compliant, and contains a library of looks, based on traditional film characteristics and specialized synthetically based looks, which can be blended together.

Just as Colorfront’s on-set dailies systems have helped to streamline and lock-down color pipelines for live-action dailies into post, now Colorfront Engine for Nuke delivers the same image and color integrity for VFX production. It enables facilities doing VFX on high-end shows to work with RAW camera footage, make sure their VFX shots cut back seamlessly to other media, such as live action dailies and other non-VFX material, with the same grading applied.
Aron Jaszberenyi, managing director of Colorfront

Set to ship in Q4 2015, Colorfront Engine for Nuke is supported on Windows 7, Mac and Linux above Nuke9.0v1, and priced at $1,000USD per Nuke seat.

During SIGGRAPH 2015 Colorfront also demonstrated the latest, cutting-edge features of Transkoder – its standalone, high-performance, file-conversion and mastering system – supporting Ultra High Definition (UHD), High Dynamic Range (HDR) production and post, using a Sony PVM X300 OLED HDR monitor to display real-time HDR output from a range of RAW camera formats in 4K.

About Colorfront: Colorfront, based in Budapest, Hungary, is one of Europe's leading DI and 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.

Media Contact:
Aron Jaszberenyi
E: aroncolorfront.com
T: +36 1 880 3900
M +36 30 311 1792