Color for Digital Cinema: Origination, Mastering, and Display
Color for Digital Cinema: The event is organized by ETC, and is sponsored by Panavision and Cine Gear Expo.
A publication-qualility flyer is available in Acrobat PDF format (421 Kbytes). It's intended for printing onto 2 sides of an 8.5x11 inch sheet, in color. Print it and tack it up on your bulletin board. (There's a quiz!) Or, print the front side at 130% onto 11x17 inch paper and it's a poster!
Digital technology has recently become an alternative to film for the origination of motion pictures, for color timing (in the form of the digital intermediate), and for display in exhibition. Each of these developments is advancing independent of the others, leading to hybrid film-digital workflows. However, film and electronic media capture and reproduce images in fundamentally different ways. Film uses subtractive colorants (CMY), but digital cinema uses additive primaries (RGB). Film is characterized using logarithms, but digital video and computer graphics is characterized using power functions. Film and digital cinema have different color gamuts, and are optimized for different contrast ratios.
In this 1-day workshop, we detail the color science that underlies image reproduction in digital cinema. We explain how color is captured, encoded, and reproduced in video, computer graphics, and film. Colors are altered depending upon their context in the image; we describe aspects of visual perception that are important in the selection of colors. For example, yellow and brown have identical CIE XYZ values - the difference is whether the surrounding area is dark or light. Reproduction of accurate color depends upon technical parameters of display equipment. We introduce display primaries, white point, and contrast ratio; we examine the effect of these parameters upon reproduced color, and describe methods of compensating the differences. We will describe color management technology, and explore its utility in cinema applications. We will explain, and demonstrate, recent developments that achieve accurate color in preview and approval of imagery destined for film. Color appearance depends upon the ambient environment at the display; we explain why colors look different at different displayed intensities. We discuss practical details of maintaining color quality through the imaging pipeline.
Participants will gain an understanding of the factors that need to be addressed to achieve accurate color, and learn pragmatic techniques that can be used to successfully implement digital cinema. Finally, although color science provides an essential technical foundation for creating and maintaining accurate color, we discuss some weaknesses of color science, and identify the areas where craft and art will always rule.
A Syllabus is available.
Registration fee is $300. Certain discounts are available; details are available at ETC's seminar page; you can register online. Owing to limited seating capacity in the screening room, enrollment is limited, and advance registration is recommended.
Charles Poynton -
Courses
& seminars
www.poynton.com/notes/events/
2004-05-11