This article is the third part of a series of articles about HDR production and resulting implications on the film set. Overall, the series covers typical use cases, presents best practices, and offers insights for setting up all required devices and systems. This third article illustrates a few tricks for dual-monitoring in HDR and SDR, talks about color grading HDR vs. SDR, and goes through a few pitfalls that can occur.
In contemporary productions, communicating relevant metadata to the VFX department is increasingly demanded. Consequently, DITs and dailies operators need tools to collect metadata and pass it on to VFX supervisors or post departments. Dynamic metadata, which contains frame-accurate value changes of camera and lens parameters, offers full transparency. Hence, spreadsheet files carrying tables of dynamic shot metadata such as CSV become common intermediate formats for VFX-heavy productions and shows that are applying new techniques such as virtual production. This article sheds light on the dynamic metadata features in Livegrade Studio and the Silverstack family.
At the start of a new production, DITs and dailies operators need to ensure their software and hardware are perfectly configured so that all individual requirements of the production are met. Consequently, prep work plays a decisive role and can often be time-consuming. This article shows how software configuration processes can get accelerated and become a lot more convenient than you would expect.
This article is the second part of a series of articles about HDR production and resulting implications on the film set. Overall, the series covers typical use cases, presents best practices, and offers insights for setting up all required devices and systems. In this second article, we will talk about all camera and monitor settings that are relevant in the context of HDR viewing. We will also illustrate how to set up and configure Livegrade and the processing devices such as LUT boxes.
We are well aware of the great importance and the vast number of skilled professionals taking care of flawless audio recording on set. However, film production can sometimes feel like a rather image-centric industry, as this saying illustrates: “You only know that you have audio when you suddenly don’t.” While we have to admit that our Silverstack products also mainly focus on handling image-based material, they do come with valuable audio features!
This is the first part of a series of articles about HDR production and the implications on the film set. The series covers typical use cases, presents best practices, and offers insights for setting up all required devices and systems. In this first article, we want to lay the foundations by discussing a few central topics: First, we cover the motivation behind using HDR technology for on-set activities. This understanding lets us derive specific requirements and consequences for camera departments generally and the DIT cart specifically. We also provide an overview of the required equipment.
Taking inspiration from labels in the analog world, digital products adopted this generic concept for their specific purposes. Our products Livegrade and Silverstack, also let you add customizable labels to either shots (Livegrade) or clips (Silverstack). In addition, our cloud application ShotHub enables you to transmit labels for look matching in Silverstack. This blog post explains how to make the most out of this handy feature by highlighting essential practicalities and key benefits of using labels within the Pomfort ecosystem.
On large scale productions that span over several countries, consistency, in general, is always an important principle. Look consistency across different units is no exception here, especially when several DPs are involved – as it has been the case on “ZeroZeroZero”. Together with DP Romain Lacourbas, we got to the bottom of the question, how the creative development of a picture can be visualized and improved by on-set grading with Livegrade.
With the last update of Livegrade, numerous new features and grading controls have been added, which offer more variability in creating and adapting looks and further support the DIT in making them accessible directly on the film set. Over the past few months, we have posted a three-part series on this topic on our blog, which we would like to put in an immediate context in this compilation article and thus offer a good foundation for making working with Livegrade a real pleasure.
Pomfort products such as Livegrade Pro and Silverstack Lab come with a broad range of color grading features and share the same, flexible concept of grading nodes. In this article, we want to take a look at what you can do with these grading nodes, illustrate a few best practices for using them in real productions, and point out the consequences for the production’s color pipeline and workflow.
