12th Color Imaging Conference - Tutorials

Scottsdale, Ariz., Nov. 10, 2004
2-hour tutorial

Color Appearance Issues in Digital Cinema Exhibition

Making movies involves more than science, and reproducing color in movies involves more than color science. The companion course, Color Science for Digital Cinema describes how color science is being applied to digital cinema; however, a great deal of tradition, craft, and art remains. In processing color images for digital cinema exhibition, and in processing images for film recording of digital masters, many color issues cannot yet be reduced to hard science. However, the emerging science of color appearance modeling promises to make a contribution. In this course, three masters of digital cinema exhibition describe how they have worked to introduce color science, and elements of color appearance models, to the workflow of digital cinema mastering and release. Brad Walker will explain some color appearance aspects of the signal processing within Texas Instruments' DLP Cinema projector. Joseph Goldstone, formerly with ILM, will explain some nuances of the film-out process, including issues in measurement. Josh Pines of Technicolor will describe the system that he has developed to enable the previewing, on a digital cinema projector, of images that will result from projection of a film recording.

Benefits: This course will enable the attendee to:

• Understand color as represented in film images
• Explain how color appearance phenomena are accommodated in digital cinema
• Recognize the challenges of color measurement in a high contrast ratio, wide-gamut environment

Intended Audience: This course is intended for scientists, engineers, and managers involved in the design, engineering, and evaluation of digital cinema, and more generally, high-quality continuous-tone color imaging products, algorithms, or systems. Participants should be familiar with color science and color image coding, and should have no fear of mathematics.

Presenters:

Charles Poynton is an independent contractor specializing in the physics, mathematics, and engineering of digital color imaging systems, including digital video, HDTV, and digital cinema (D-cinema). While at Sun Microsystems, from 1988 to 1995, he initiated Sun's HDTV research project, and introduced color management technology to Sun. In February 2003, Mr. Poynton's book, Digital Video and HDTV Algorithms and Interfaces, was Amazon.com's 3,339-th most popular book.

Brad Walker is a system engineer at Texas Instruments. He is responsible for the development of color signal processing hardware, firmware, and software in TI's DLP Cinema projector systems.

Josh Pines is Vice-President of Imaging Research and Development at Technicolor. He leads Technicolor's efforts in the development of systems for digital cinema mastering and previewing.

Joseph Goldstone is the founder and principal of Lilliputian Pictures. He consults and writes code to apply color science to cinema. Prior to striking out on his own, he worked for ILM. He recorded several digital movies out to film, and he contributed to the development of the OpenEXR standard.

See also the companion course, Color Science for Digital Cinema.

Registration is between USD 150 and USD 225. For details, see the Color Imaging Conference Tutorials page.

Charles Poynton - Courses & seminars
2004-08-29