cineSpace at Cine&FX

"We heard about cineSpace four years ago. At that time, we were a post house specialising in advertising for video and our only contact with film was sending digital betacam to the lab for the return to film of a spot.

"Then came the time when we landed our first film. We were excited, but the lab doing the scans began to speak another language - log, DPX, Cineon - and, most importantly, what we saw on our Barcos wasn't good enough for them anymore. Suddenly they were asking us about LUTs and how we wanted to work. We didn't have any idea - we came from video, the blessed land where what you see on your SDI monitor is what you get!

"At that time I was working on Avid Media Illusion and so I asked a question about colour consistency on the Illusion mailing list. Also at that time, Didier Elzinga (co-developer of cineSpace) was reading the list - that's how we met (and discovered cineSpace).

"I did all the compositing work on Illusion using cineSpace - 3D fireflies to comp over a night shot, with brilliant green halos around the fireflies. I did some day for night shots and even tracked stars and a moon in the sky. Then we sent our sequences to the lab. We didn't hear anything from them - good or bad - until they called us that the return to film was done and it was time to go see it.

"When I went to the lab and the lights in the projection room went off, I was terrified! But as soon as the images came up, my heart found peace again. What was on that projection screen was exactly what I saw on my computer screen. Even extreme cases like the day for night shots were exactly what was on that screen.

"That was four years ago. Nowadays, I can speak about log, lin and DPX with someone for hours. I gave my Barco SDI monitor to our offline editor and I make my own LUTs. The only thing that is still the same is that I use cineSpace - well, version 2 now, which is even more accurate.

"Our last development was getting into digital (colour) grading. That's somewhat different from compositing, asking for a lot more accuracy in our calibration with the lab we'll work with. But again, cineSpace was there - this time via its cineCube module. I've generated a standard LUT with cineSpace using the default 2383 (Kodak Vision) profile provided by Rising Sun (Research). It's already 90% correct. But the best part is that I then had my lab shoot a test pattern that was sent to Rising Sun, and they made a profile based on this test - making us 100% calibrated with our lab.

"I don't fear projection anymore. In fact, I kind of enjoy it now because I'm confident of the result - well, colourwise speaking. I still find some compositing glitches on a big screen that we didn't see on our small screens, but I haven't found a solution for that yet!"

Jean-Luc Gason
Technical Director / FX Supervisor / Compositing Artist
Main Frame Facilities / Cine&FX


Go back to Customer Stories...