What is the best Color Management(CMS)?

[Ildus gabidullin]

What is the best Color Management(CMS)
and who what uses ?

• Filmlight Truelight 
• OpenColorIO (OCIO)
• Resolve Color Management 
• Autodesk Color Management (SynColor)

[Mazze]

SCRATCH color management.

[Nicolas Hanson]

On 30.8.2016 at 11:03 AM, Mazze said:

SCRATCH color management.

May I ask why?

[Mazze]

It's pretty easy :-) .

Obviously, there's always Pros&Cons - SCRATCH's CMS is not necessarily the best - I just thought, the initial list was a bit short ;-) .

Color management in SCRATCH is pretty straight forward:

- you flag your interface monitor with a color space (e.g. sRGB) and your SDI-output seperately (e.g. P3 for a projector)

- now flag your footage accordingly (e.g. as Rec709, or ACES, etc.) - usually this is done automatically by SCRATCH anyways

===> SCRATCH will do the appropriate conversion to sRGB for your interface monitor, and to P3 for SDI.

You can also mix clips of different color spaces in one timeline and for each, the correct transform will be applied.

Additionally, you can add LUTs to both, interface and SDI displays (e.g. for calibration).

Lastly, you can flag your output with a color space (e.g. XYZ if you wanna render for DCI) -

again SCRATCH will do the corresponding transform for each clip (e.g. Rec709) to what the output node is flagged with (e.g. XYZ) upon rendering.

 

There's a tutorial on this in the SCRATCH tutorials section :-) .

[Abby Bader]

Hello all. Isn't this something all the color managements take care of? Any differences between them?

[Bruno Mansi]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are pushing the ACES system, and some of the grading software mentioned above have already added ACES 1.0. The advantages to ACES is supposed to be "seamless interchange of high quality motion picture images regardless of source".  What I understand this to mean is that we can all bring in, or export material (or metadata) from  other departments (eg. Editorial, VFX) and not have to worry about different colour spaces etc.

[Abby Bader]

But colour spaces is a creative choice as well isn't it? 

[Bruno Mansi]

26 minutes ago, Abby Bader said:

But colour spaces is a creative choice as well isn't it? 

Playing with colour spaces will obviously alter the look of your material, but you still have to select an output colour space to match the intended destination (eg. P3, REC 709). The point of ACES is to make sure that your grade will look correct wherever it goes.

[Abby Bader]

Ok, I can see that ACES is unique in its way. But what is the main differences between the color management tools mentioned above? 

[Alex Prohorushkin]

Hi,

I think THE Best is 

• Filmlight Truelight 

Alex

[Abby Bader]

Hi Alex. What makes Truelight the best in your opinion?

[Andy Minuth]

I think it depends on the use case.

If you just want to calibrate your display devices, something like CalMan or LightSpace is probably the best choice. 

If you want to build a consistent color pipeline across many departments, I think You will need several of the mentioned tools. OCIO is great to set up the VFX part, because it is available in Nuke and AfterEffects. But for the main color pipeline in the grading system, I use Truelight Colour Spaces (the colour framework within Baselight) and Truelight (standalone color management tool). 

What I like about these tools:

- I am a Baselight user, so it is quite handy to use the built in colour engineering

- Besides technical, I have a lot of creative choices (e.g. DRTs), and I can easily add a creative grade to a transform

- The scripting language is not too complicated. I am not a software developer and also not a colour scientist. But I am able to create new custom color spaces, and TCS takes care of all the rest.

- It can import and export almost any kind of LUT. For example it is quite easy to export a custom lookup table for the Nuke artists, so that they can see the intended look of a show in sRGB or Rec1886, while You are working in P3.

In Baselight 5 they will add some new interesting features in this area, for example a mastering colour space, that is a gamut limiter for wide gamut deliveries, etc.

To be honest, I never intensively used the color management of Resolve, Autodesk, Scratch, etc. That is why I can't judge their performance in comparison to the Filmlight tools. I just wanted to explain my point of view.

 

[Alex Prohorushkin]

4 hours ago, Abby Bader said:

Hi Alex. What makes Truelight the best in your opinion?

Hi Abby.

- Very easy change between differents Colorspaces.

- Very TRUE mathematical algorithms (Conversion LUTs is NOT have it)

- Full control for every stage.

And more))

Edited September 29, 2016 by Alex Prohorushkin

[Tom Evans]

41 minutes ago, Andy Minuth said:

I use Truelight Colour Spaces (the colour framework within Baselight) and Truelight (standalone color management tool). 

Is the Trulight standalone tool ment to be used to manage color on other color correction platforms, or as a tool to ensure a consistent color pipeline across departments, studios and systems?

[Andy Minuth]

2 minutes ago, Tom Evans said:

Is the Trulight standalone tool ment to be used to manage color on other color correction platforms, or as a tool to ensure a consistent color pipeline across departments, studios and systems?

The standalone tool is intended to do a classic DI calibration. This means that its main purpose is to generate and tweak a 3D LUT from a set of colour-patches that went through an analogue film lab. This print emulation LUT was essential to get a decent film-out. With film labs closing around the globe, this workflow is getting less important.

But Truelight can also be used to tweak or convert existing LUTs. Besides the main application it also includes a set of command line tools (tl utils) that are intended for advanced users. 

To answer Your question: I think TCS (inside Baselight) is the more modern approach and probably the better way to output different LUTs for other systems. But it is nice to have the standalone Truelight additionally.

[Alex Prohorushkin]

To date, the best algorithm than Truelight who does the transformation I've never met.
The use of LUT is only a certain patch. That being successfully works.
But Truelight is a mathematical algorithm used for each specific input-output object.

What allows you to make and How? no one system.

So for myself I see it Trulight most advanced and relevant tool in this regard.  "the best Color Management of the Year)"

Alex.

[Alex Prohorushkin]

So, why is Baselight?

 

[Alex Prohorushkin]

And....