Colorfront returns to NAB with news of its updated Colorfront Engine as well as details of its support for Apple Vision Pro immersive technology.

Colorfront will continue to demonstrate its leadership in mastering, quality control, dailies, remote collaboration and innovative immersive experiences, with advances across its product lines being showcased during NAB 2024 from Presidential Suites at The Conrad Hotel, Las Vegas.  The company has news to share with attendees, but one is attracting attention, after the recent launch of the Apple Vision Pro, featuring ground-breaking immersive content that sets a new benchmark in storytelling.

According to Colorfront, central to this innovation was Colorfront’s On-Set Dailies system running on Mac Studio, which was instrumental in bringing to life the originals envisioned by Apple. Produced with the cutting-edge Apple Immersive Video, this content includes vivid films, plus narratives from celebrated creators such as Jon Favreau and Alicia Keys, offering viewers an experience that is not just watched but felt, thanks to 180º 3D 8K recordings with Spatial Audio.

“We are known for innovation and our focus on enabling customers to work more efficiently as well as leveraging new opportunities for their existing content while supporting innovative visual experiences,” said Mark Jaszberenyi, CEO of Colorfront. “Colorfront is at the forefront of this transformative era in digital entertainment with tools that give creators the potential to realize their creative visions.”

New Dolby Vision features

Colorfront’s presence in Las Vegas serves as the stage to show enhancements that will positively impact Colorfront users’ mastery over the art and science of color in their evolving workflows, which include new Dolby Vision features enabling content owners to leverage their asset catalogs, AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools that accelerate QC processes, plus automation and connectivity applications powered via a newly-enhanced Colorfront Engine.

Additionally, Colorfront will showcase the peerless quality of its cloud-computing implementations and Streaming solutions for remote applications by ‘live-steaming’ footage, processed by Transkoder in AWS in Oregon, doing away with deskside workstations and using hotel broadband for all demos.

Here is some more information, shared by Colorfront, about its products on display in Las Vegas during NAB 2024:

Transkoder unleashes Dolby Vision mastering to content owners:

Colorfront has pioneered HDR for over a decade, underpinned by continual advances in Colorfront Engine’s state-of-the-art parametric color processing and an ongoing collaboration with Dolby.

Latest advances to Transkoder

Addressing the global surge in HDR-ready displays and devices, together with demand from content owners to leverage their catalogs of film and TV programming, Transkoder now offers a straightforward, time-efficient, and cost-effective way to convert standard SDR assets into Dolby Vision HDR masters with corresponding XML metadata, from which Dolby Vision SDR masters can also be created that match and preserve the original creative intention.

The latest advances to Transkoder encompass new tools for converting DCDM/DCP masters to Dolby Vision, auto-detection for bright titles that may need to be managed separately from other content, read/write support for ProRes with alpha channel, and integration support for varying workflows, from fully automated to operator-managed.

Ci Media Cloud, Sony’s collaboration and media management service, has added new ways to streamline production workflows and strengthen non-linear editing collaboration. Ci has significantly expanded its media processing capabilities with the addition of Colorfront Transkoder direct input into the platform, to be seen at Sony’s booth (SL3065) during NAB.

Colorfront Engine gets updated:

Colorfront Engine has been updated to further optimize color volume remapping and the rendering of extreme colors in new digital cameras, including the Sony Burano and ARRI Alexa 35. Along with Colorfront’s own product line, Colorfront Engine is also integrated into AJA’s popular, compact, high-performance FS-HDR and Colorbox convertors for color-managed workflows in broadcast, live events, and on-set applications, seen at AJA’s booth (SL3065) on the NAB show floor.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools accelerate QC operations:

Being forever mindful about enhancing productivity, Colorfront has introduced advanced AI vision-analysis tools to assist master QC operations with detecting framing anomalies, dead pixels, bright titles and sparkles. These tools augment the AI capabilities already integrated into Transkoder, such as object detection and speech recognition for multi-language SRT subtitling from audio tracks.

Colorfront has developed new tools to help QC operators navigate thousands of AI-detected tags. These features, along with customizable metadata file validation, pre-processing of analysis tasks and automation, combine to deliver improved and more efficient QC logging.

Colorfront On-Set Dailies & Express Dailies get AI toolkits too:

Colorfront’s hugely popular On-Set Dailies and Express Dailies support the latest digital camera formats, including Sony Burano and ARRI Alexa 35, and feature augmented capabilities for ACES 1.3 workflows, tools for retiming HFR (high-frame-rate) clips, with new APIs and corresponding web interfaces for automation. On-set dailies and Express Dailies will be shown with AI tools to detect dead pixels, sparkles, slate/claps, and automated metadata extraction for accurate audio sync.