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Color Spaces of the VFX Pipeline Part 6: Display Space

display devices

The current state of affairs is that for television work our workstation displays are reasonably close to replicating the HDTV color space, look and feel. This is not true for feature film work as our workstations fall far below the digital cinema projectors’ capabilities. But all of this is about to change. An awesome new color space is being deployed that not only approaches the limits of human vision, but that same color space will now be used for workstation monitors, broadcast television, and digital cinema. To understand the present and get ready for the future, read on.

Color Spaces of the VFX Pipeline Part 3: Camera Space

cameras in the vfx color pipeline

We saw in Part 2, the Real World, how scenes can have an enormous dynamic range that far exceeds our cameras. The inevitable result of this is the camera must clip the scene at its maximum brightness level, so we will explore solutions to that clipping. Film, on the other hand, does a soft clip at the shoulder of the film response curve that is far more elegant. Cameras also perceive color differently than our eyes and those differences must be understood and accounted for. Cameras also introduce their own digital idiosyncrasies to the image such as rolling shutter and digital noise due to their electro-optical design. This too must be understood that we may compensate for them in our work.

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Color Spaces of the VFX Pipeline Part 2: World Space

Bird at sunset

The visual effects color pipeline starts in the real world, of course. The light from surfaces and light sources are captured by cameras and travels a data path through several “spaces” to the movie screen. The challenge for visual effects is that the real world presents color and light in a totally different way that far exceeds the capacity of our display devices so a degraded version of the original scene must be carefully managed in order to deliver the most realistic version of the original scene to the audience. The real world is not a “color space” in the color science sense, but instead is presented here as the “World Space” where our entire VFX pipeline begins.

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