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Part 1: DTS Digital Images Leading the
Charge
Part 2:
SpeedGrade in the Lowry Pipeline
Part 3: Working Together to Make it
Better
Part 4:
The Story of John Lowry and DTS Digital Images |
IRIDAS: How did John Lowry get past the
"1/30th of a second barrier?"
Mike: John built this company on the principle of doing the
image processing in software which could divide the job over multiple
general purpose machines. This allowed him to use complex, proprietary
algorithms that delivered quality far beyond what could be computed on
real time closed-architecture hardware.
Click on image to
see the full pipeline scheme
IRIDAS: Your whole pipeline is computer-based? Mike: That's
right. When John and I first met in the mid nineties, we were both
convinced that computers would sweep the industry, automating workflows
and making high-end pipelines ever more economical. Our pipeline today
confirms that vision.
IRIDAS: Is this why you chose SpeedGrade?
Mike: Yes. We wanted a software-based, resolution independent technology
so that our color corrector was based on the same principles as the rest
of the image processing we do here. In addition, SpeedGrade gives us the
flexibility of editable color decisions which is helpful since it easily
accommodates multiple deliverables like film preservation elements, home
video masters, and digital cinema masters.
IRIDAS: This must increase your overall
efficiency.
Mike: SpeedGrade saves us quite a bit of computing time! In traditional
color correction systems, each and every color decision gets computed
into the image frames and you have to store - and keep track of - all of
those permutations. With SpeedGrade, the color decisions are maintained
as metadata and only applied at the end of the process. I can't
overemphasize the savings that delivers. Any time a change is made to
the color grading, or even the look of an entire movie, the changes are
only made to what is, essentially, a color edit list. That edit list is
fully changeable anywhere and at any time. It is only rendered once, at
the end of the whole process.
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DTS Digital Images uses a bank of 600 Mac G5s to for their
proprietary image enhancement processes … and for rendering content with
SpeedGrade DI
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