VIVID™ Color Science is the collective name for a suite of advanced image-processing steps used by the ACHTEL 9×7 Digital Cinema Camera available through associated workflows and third-party postproduction tools for Cinema DNG processing.
It includes advanced camera colour profiles (IDTs) for more accurate and smooth colour reproduction, an ultra-wide colour gamut, expanded dynamic range processing and film-like highlight fall-off, and Direct Scene-Referred (DSR) colour processing pipeline.
Advanced Camera Colour Profiles is a new feature that allows cinematographers to fundamentally change the way in which the camera interprets colours.
Until now, cameras have been pre-programmed with a default linear colour profiles (IDTs) that determine the accuracy of all colours. However, this approach significantly limits the accuracy of super-saturated colours, which are often clipped by being mapped outside the spectral locus. The accuracy of those super-saturated colours has been impossible to achieve through means of a linear transforms (IDTs) commonly used in colour processing pipelines. These limitations let to workarounds, such as gamut compression, which do not fully solve the problem of super-saturated colour reproduction in digital cameras. The ACHTEL 9×7 provides the option to choose non-linear processing of super-saturated colours, while still retaining the smoothness, accuracy and tonalities of subtle colours, such as skin tones.
Film-Like highlight control and extended dynamic range processing allows additional 2 ~ 4 stops of dynamic range as well as soft and smooth handling of overexposed areas, just like film emulsions used to reproduce highlights. There is no “hard clipping” or “ringing” often associated with digital images.
The 9×7 Digital Cinema Camera produces natural-looking smooth highlights gradations whilst retaining full detail and chromaticity.
And, because 9×7 camera uses 16-bit linear uncompressed RAW, highlights are much smoother and well beyond what typical log encoding is able to retain.
Direct Sceene-Referred (DSR) colour processing workflow takes ACES to completely different level.
Instead of using fixed camera colour profile (IDT), the cinematographer can create colorimetric profile in-situ, at the actual scene using specific lighting on set. This custom colour profile is attached as metadata to each clip and will produce colorimetric images “out of the gate” without the need for chromatic adaptation (colour temperature adjustment) or any other colour correction and assures consistent look irrespective of lighting on the actual set, whether tungsten, daylight, LED or anything in-between.
This scene was lit with ARRI SkyPanels at 5600°K. As most LED light sources, their spectral response is far from contiguous “black body” radiation. Until now, digital cameras could not create colorimetric images “out of the gate”. The DSR (Direct Scene Referred) feature, which is unique to the 9×7 digital cinema camera, is able to capture not just the image, but full spectral distribution of the illuminant, which allows it to create custom (scene referred) IDT (Input Device Transform) and attach it to every frame of every clip. This allows colour grading software to read this metadata and apply scene-specific IDT producing colorimetric images without the need of colour correction irrespective of the lighting conditions.
