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FilmLight's Baselight Eight

Aug 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Adam Glasman and Asa Shoul, Framestore CFC

Realtime Digital Grading at 4K

When we demo our DI capabilities to clients — particularly people new to this field — they're frequently blown away by how much we can do in digital grading. There's simply no comparison to going the traditional lab route in terms of the flexibility and the immediacy of software, and they all want those capabilities. Meanwhile, DPs and directors who have worked in TV and used telecine expect the same tools to be available for film — and in realtime.

We need to satisfy both of those clients. To that end, we've found those needs are best met by the Baselight system from FilmLight. Baselight is a software-based grading system for film and video that can be combined with dedicated hardware to support realtime grading at 4K. We have 11 Baselight seats — three of which are the company's top-of-the-line Baselight Eight realtime 4K system, one for each of our three DI grading suites.

Baselight Eight came out when we were halfway through grading The Constant Gardener (City of God director Fernando Meirelles' new project). We finished the film with it.

Our experience using Baselight has been positive from day one. Although we didn't get a chance to test out the realtime capabilities at 4K, we got a taste of the system's speed at 2K. Looking at how we used Baselight Eight on The Constant Gardener gives a good idea of the product's strengths.

The film was shot on both 35mm and Super 16. That wasn't a problem, since Baselight handles multiple formats. We were able to do all of the grading in a single pass.

Because much of the film takes place in Africa, it's incredibly bright, while many of the actors have really dark skin. But once contrast was added (per cinematographer César Charlone's wishes), detail was lost in the dark areas of some faces. To correct this problem we keyed the blacks, softened the key with Gaussian blur, and lifted the exposure in the problem area. We were able to introduce contrast while maintaining detail, yet we could still work in realtime.

In addition, Baselight's intuitive, timeline-based GUI allows simple decoding of grades applied. This was particularly important as two of us worked on the project at different times. It was very important to see exactly what grade had been applied by another operator without having to scroll through pages of grade layers and without having to eye match, as you have to with some systems.

At any time, we could compare the scene we were working on with any shot in the film to make sure all of the looks were consistent. You can build a whole storyboard in the gallery and look up and down the entire movie.

One of our favorite things about Baselight is the film-style grading tool, which allows log exposure changes to be made using a telecine-style hue circle. In turn, the hue circle is linked to log exposure RGB sliders calibrated in printer points. We feel that this approach, used as a starting point, is sympathetic to the tonal curves of film. In telecine you tend to grade by feel, but with film you have to be more disciplined, because the medium is print.

Baselight refers back to printer points, which are familiar to DPs and give us full control over exposure, contrast, and saturation. The curve control lets us adjust shadows, midtones, and highlights separately, working with sliders or trackballs. This alone cuts out two to three steps from the process. Baselight also offers telecine-style grading, although we generally work with the film-grading method.

We also had our first opportunity to work with the new Baselight tracker on The Constant Gardener. We used it often to put a grade in a sky or lift someone's eyes. Compared to the time it took us to do this kind of work on faces in the past, the new tracker's speed represented many hours saved.

One of the major reasons we use Baselight, however, is for its Truelight color management software. Since DI requires visualizing digital film images on electronic display devices, it's really only feasible with accurate print emulation. To that end, we built an LUT for The Constant Gardener for its Fuji 3513 film and for Soho Images, the lab we worked with. The combination allowed us to manage color very precisely.

With the Truelight library, we're able to have different LUTs that correspond to every lab in London, as well as every stock and every video projector and monitor in the facility. We're constantly tweaking them, and Truelight gives us the tools to do that.

Our three DI grading suites are equipped with digital projectors. For the colorist and the DP or director, the experience of grading on a big screen is far superior to grading on a computer screen or HD monitor, since the size of the picture reflects the experience of sitting in a movie theater.

Finally — and definitely the biggest benefit of Baselight Eight — speed. The software is identical to the standard Baselight, but there's no longer the issue of caching. You just work in realtime and the job goes much quicker.

Now that DPs are finding themselves so involved in grading, it's much better for them if there's no waiting around. The Baselight software is fairly fast for a single grade — nearly realtime. But with shapes, blurs, changes in skin tone, and so on, you have to cache, and wait.

But with Baselight Eight you can put a number of primary and secondary grades on one shot and it just plays back on the spot. Since we received the system in the final three weeks of grading The Constant Gardener, we were able, in realtime, to try different looks right up to the end. There's no way we would have been able to handle all of that experimentation had we had to cache and render.

We've been using Baselight, and the technology behind it, since about 1998, before it was even commercially available. Since FilmLight expanded development on Baselight as a commercial product, we've been early Beta testers, and we have seen and contributed to the product's advancement.

At the start, it was more of a corrective tool, but FilmLight has transformed it into an amazing creative system. It's encouraging to us that they are continuing with their production-oriented development philosophy. These days, we're benefiting from all the improvements that a broader range of customer feedback brings, too.

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Adam Glasman is senior colorist at Framestore CFC and a pioneer in digital color grading, with credits on films including The Jacket, Cold Mountain, Thunderbirds, Enduring Love, and Die Another Day.

Asa Shoul is a colorist at Framestore CFC, with credits on films and television shows including DreamKeeper, Layer Cake, and The Libertine.

London-based Framestore CFC is the largest visual effects and computer animation studio in Europe, with more than 20 years of experience in digital film and video technology. The company's credits include hundreds of films, TV shows, and commercial projects including all of the Harry Potter films, Cold Mountain, Troy, Dinotopia, Walking with Dinosaurs, and spots for Levi's, Xbox, Audi, and many others. Visit www.framestore-cfc.com for more information.

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