COLORFRONT DELIVERS INNOVATIONS FOR HDR CINEMA AT CINEMACON 2025

Showcasing tools that streamline digital cinema workflows for HDR projectors and emissive LED walls, with a follow-up presentation alongside Barco at SMPTE’s Future Of Cinema Conference.

CINEMACON, APRIL 1, 2025 – Colorfront (colorfront.com), the multi-award-winning developer of high-performance dailies/transcoding/streaming systems for motion pictures, OTT, broadcast and commercials – is celebrating 25 years of excellence in color in 2025, and will exhibit the very latest advances to its arsenal of HDR cinema mastering and display tools at CinemaCon, (booth #2422A) March 31 to April 3, at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas.

Additionally, as the latest HDR-capable projectors and emissive LED walls roll-out across thousands of theater locations worldwide, Colorfront will join Barco to present at SMPTE’s Future Of Cinema Conference: Scene In A New Light on April 5.

HDR projectors and emissive LED video walls are rapidly gaining popularity across the global cinema industry for their abilities to deliver immersive viewing experiences to audiences via spectacular image quality, delivering exquisite detail, vivid colors, deep blacks and brilliant highlights.

CinemaCon visitors will discover how Colorfront’s HDR Cinema Tools, powered by the HPA Award-winning Colorfront Engine, support the DCI HDR Cinema standard, streamline HDR cinema mastering workflows and enable the successful implementation of the latest HDR display technologies in theaters. These encompass new HDR laser projection systems from Barco, Christie and Dolby Vision, plus new-generation emissive displays, including Samsung Onyx Cinema LED screens, all being showcased during Cinemacon 2025.

Along with efficiently producing the required HDR cinema deliverables, Colorfront HDR Cinema Tools also solve the challenges of ensuring color fidelity and preserving the original artistic intent, while eliminating time-consuming workarounds in color management/grading processes.

Colorfront Engine is a state-of-the-art color-volume remapper, which features in Colorfront’s Transkoder, the market leader for mastering, packaging, QC, versioning and delivery of cinema content, and its award-winning On-Set Dailies/Express Dailies products. Colorfront Engine uses the Human Perceptual Model to handle the wide range of color gamuts and brightness levels in multi-source/multi-display mastering.

The trove of Colorfront’s HDR Cinema Tools being showcased at CinemaCon includes the following cutting-edge technologies:

HDR Cinema: No matter the hero grade, the HDR Cinema Tool manages the conversions for any required cinema target deliverables, including projectors and emissive displays. Along with 48-nit SDR, Dolby Vision and PLF formats, Colorfront also supports the latest Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) specifications for HDR D-Cinema, meaning that HDR DCPs created in Transkoder meet DCI standards for HDR content.

HDR Roll-off: Transkoder’s HDR Roll-off tool enables users to easily roll-off the highlights in HDR content, via controls to manage peak luminance and the softness of the roll-off curve, with the perceptual color engine maintaining the original look. This feature is powerful when creating highlight-managed deliverables for HDR exhibition technologies.

For example, Colorfront HDR Cinema Tools integrate with Barco’s Lightsteering technology. This allows automated roll-off adjustments and empowers professionals to trim and fine-tune display parameters with unprecedented accuracy, ensuring optimal performance and exceptional image quality during the mastering process for Barco HDR Cinema.

Colorfront’s HDR Cinema Tools have been used to create the Barco HDR cinema versions of a multitude of feature films, including Tokyo Cowboy (2023) and Kraven The Hunter (2024).

HDR Brightness Guard & Subtitle Brightness Detection: Some HDR content can be visually-disturbing when large areas of the image are overly-bright, such as large titles and burned-in subtitles. With the HDR Brightness Guard and Subtitle Brightness Detection tools users can quickly identify shots in their timeline that may contain blocks of overly-bright highlights and adjust their brightness independently of the background image, for an optimal HDR master.

Colorfront Streaming Server / Streaming Player: Colorfront streaming solutions fully-support the DCI HDR Cinema standard and deliver reference-quality, low-latency, frame/color accurate performance for remote collaboration, across different time zones and continents. They can used to stream content to any HDR cinema for remote grading, review and final QC, in standard SDR 48-nit as well as HDR for remote playback at the highest-quality level.

"Colorfront’s HDR Cinema Tools harness 25 years of expertise in the art and science of color, and are playing a key role in the new era of big screen HDR entertainment, through their plug-and-play simplicity to produce the required deliverables with efficiency and convenience." said Aron Jaszberenyi, managing director of Colorfront.

"At Barco, we believe that true cinematic HDR demands synergy between creative intent and display technology," said Dr. Anders Ballestad, head of content & studio relations at Barco. "Collaborating with Colorfront to integrate our Lightsteering technology with their HDR Cinema Tools ensures every frame is shown with unparalleled clarity, color fidelity and dynamic range – delivering a cinema experience that immerses audiences like never before."

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