Hamburg-based Optical Art, one of Germany's leading postproduction facilities, has chosen to enhance its color grading suite with a Kinoton DCS Digital Cinema Solution. This system consists of a DCP 30 SX II Digital Cinema Projector manufactured by Kinoton and based on projection technology provided by Barco, plus a RealD 3D Post Production Kit.
Color grading is an important step in the creative process of film making. Colorists digitally alter and enhance a motion picture’s colors until they have exactly the look and feel that the filmmaker has in mind. Advanced 1.2’’ 2K DLP Cinema® Series II technology from Texas Instruments makes sure that the DCP 30 SX II projector delivers a calibrated, consistent digital image that meets all DCI specifications, including those on contrast ratio, color accuracy, and color uniformity. The projector displays the colors on the grading suite's 65-square-foot silver screen exactly as audiences around the world will later see them – the colorists and their clients can thus evaluate the corrections under realistic cinema conditions.
The DCP 30 SX II projector also includes a postproduction version of the D-Cine Communicator software. This valuable tool gives colorists full control over how the projector reproduces colors and lets them edit the look-up tables (LUTs) for color, gamma, and 3D. The software also has a PCF editor for changing the Projector Configuration Files (PCFs) that come with the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) and creating new ones. The PCFs contain all of the projector settings that are required to display the movie as defined by the movie distributor, such as color space, gamma value and source aspect ratio.
Color grading for 3D movies differs from 2D grading. It involves adjusting the lower limit of projection brightness, eliminating image ghosting, and compensating for slight color changes caused by the 3D glasses. The Kinoton DCS solution therefore features a special RealD 3D system that includes a postproduction control module with a realtime ghostbusting circuit. It also helps colorists balance the right-eye/left-eye color of live action 3D movies. This is necessary in order to offset small variations in color and brightness caused by slight differences between the lenses, mirrors, and CCD sensors of the two cameras used to shoot 3D motion pictures. Perfect matching of the right-eye and left-eye pictures results in sharper and clearer 3D images for an ideal cinematic experience.
