Adding a new Lustre to color grading - Post News

Post, July, 2003

MONTREAL -- Lustre, the software-only, realtime 2K color correction system aimed at the digital cinema market, is a seemingly new offering that's born of a relationship between Discreet (www.discreet.com) and Colorfront (www.colorfront.com). Headed by Mark aszberenyi, the Budapest-based software developer Colorfront was originally in league with SD before its demise.

Discreet stepped in early this year as a partner providing technology support and worldwide marketing, and is taking Lustre forward as a new breed of color corrector. Discreet is promising realtime primary color correction and playback of up to 2K 10bit RGB data, secondary color correction tools and advanced proxy management for realtime preview of complex effects. For data-to-video and video-to-film workflows, Lustre offers SD and HD video I/O capabilities, including pan & scan.

With his technology already responsible for the digital color grading of Lord of the Rings, Stuart Little 2 and Finding Nemo, Colorfront's Jaszberenyi has taken an apartment near Hollywood. He has an intriguing tale of co-authorship with Peter Doyle, the head of color correction at New Zealand's bluntly named Post House, whom he'd met at BC 2000 and went on to collaborate with on the original Colorfront system used on LOTR.

Now Lustre is promising more filmmakers a chance to collaborate and interact more directly in the historically arcane process of "color grading." They don't have to use a lab. They can easily view and adjust the color, look and tone of either a short take or a large tract of film or even grade an entire movie by way of a storyboard of scene thumbnails. This feature, which has taken on the nickname 'look-design," will prove to be a big selling point, according to Discreet's new VP of systems product development, Marc Petit, based here.

Although Discreet is overtly targeting the traditional Hazeltine user, the system has a control surface reminiscent of a daVinci and Discreet boasts a price point that's 30 percent to 50 percent lower than the market leader. Petit wants talented colorists to get acquainted with Lustre's charms but Discreet is also going to the "customers of our customers" emphasizing to directors and DPs attending shows such as the recent Cannes film festival that "with Lustre you can do more. You can transform this process of just matching colors from one shot to the next into an actual creative process. You can have a lot more control of-the final picture."

Although Petit has seen some resistance from skeptical traditionalists, he points to Finding Nemo's success. "Now you have a fully nonlinear digital process and the relationship between grading and editing is totally blurred. Pixar did not rely on an outside lab to grade Finding Nemo, they brought the Lustre system in-house and they were very happy to do so because they had much more artistic control over the final picture and they are not dependent on a chemical company, another set of eyes."