Autodesk Lustre 2008

Autodesk Launches Lustre 2008 Digital Colour Grading System for Film and Television Projects

Enables Creative Colour Grading throughout Post-Production Process; Supports American Society of Cinematographers’ Color Decision List

6 September 2007 — Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) today announced the Autodesk Lustre 2008 digital colour grading system. Lustre has shaped colours and lighting in hundreds of feature films, trailers and TV shows, including Balls of Fury, El Cantante, Children of Men, Babel, King Kong, Cane, Pushing Daisies and Swingtown. Lustre 2008 will be showcased at Autodesk’s stand during the International Broadcasters Convention 2007, held in Amsterdam’s RAI Convention Centre, 7-11 September.

“Around the world, Autodesk Lustre is used to enhance lighting, cinematography and storytelling in films and TV content,” said Stig Gruman, vice president of Advanced Systems, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. “Lustre 2008 equips colourists with even more creative flexibility and includes a new multi-layer timeline. Colourists can experiment with look creation earlier in the post-production process. As well, Lustre 2008 offers a better workflow that leads to faster project completion and ultimately offers greater value for all types of productions.”

Companies rely on the Lustre system’s advanced creative capabilities, as well as its cost-effective performance that is made possible through Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-acceleration, pipeline flexibility and facility-wide application interoperability.

Andreas Rostock, managing director at Sonne Postproduction in Denmark, said, “At Sonne, we’re ready to take on any kind of project, from feature films to music videos, but we specialise in commercials. We’ve developed a workflow that gives us the flexibility needed to take on any type of job and Autodesk Lustre fits well into our process. The new multi-layer timeline in Lustre 2008 will give us greater workflow flexibility in terms of how we conform, while the rich grading toolset will allow us to expand our creative capabilities to deliver a higher-quality product to our customers.”

Chris Jacobson, colourist at LaserPacific Media Corporation, also sees great value in the Lustre workflow, particularly as it relates to the interoperability between Lustre and the Autodesk Smoke editing/finishing system. Jacobson commented: “We can easily share media between Lustre and Smoke with no time-consuming rendering in between, thanks to Autodesk’s Wiretap technology. In essence, the editorial and digital intermediate colour sessions can happen simultaneously, making our clients very happy. With a pipeline like this, you really can be in two places at once. It brings multi-tasking to a whole new level.”

Highlights of Lustre 2008

New creative tools:

•	The new multi-layer timeline gives colourists gestural tools to quickly create editorial, shot and grade versions of their project. Colourists can experiment with multiple looks on a single shot, as well as easily applying a look across multiple shots.

•	With the automatic region tracker, colourists can track elements of a scene faster than ever before. Colourists can specify an image region and Lustre figures out the rest, automatically analysing inside the region in order to apply scaling and rotation to secondary geometries.

Workflow and performance improvements:

•	Lustre 2008 supports The American Society of Cinematographers’ Color Decision List (ASC-CDL). The ASC-CDL was developed to ensure that images appear the same when displayed in different places on different platforms. This leads to look consistency across the various stages of post-production, from on-set look creation to the final grade. Lustre 2008 allows colourists to import multiple CDLs, either as Slope-Offset-Power (SOP) values in an edit decision list (EDL), or as files referenced in the EDL comments, to which CDL data can be applied on a per-shot basis in the Lustre timeline.

•	The Lustre system’s grading functions now include additional GPU-acceleration of secondary grading capabilities, including geometry blurring and inside/outside grading, as well as GPU-accelerated playback for plug-in effects such as Blur Mix, Print Bleach and Glow. These improvements speed up the look-creation process.

For a complete list of new features and enhancements in Autodesk Lustre 2008, visit www.autodesk.com/lustre.