Colorfront, the Academy and Emmy Award-winning developer of high-performance, dailies and transcoding systems for motion pictures, high-end episodic TV and commercials, has unveiled Colorfront Transkoder 2014, the automated standalone system for high-quality file conversion now featuring ground-breaking real-time 8K and 3D4K capabilities.
Colorfront is previewing performance-boosting innovations for Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV) postproduction at IBC 2014, Amsterdam, from Sept. 12-15. Colorfront will also show the shipping 2014 versions of its On-Set Dailies and Express Dailies systems at IBC.
Colorfront Transkoder is already employed by leading studios, VFX and post facilities involved in digital cinema and high-end TV production. Colorfront Transkoder 2014 is available on Mac, PC and the cloud for many key tasks: editing RAW film data, converting material to various output formats, plus conforming, color grading and rendering 2K / 4K / 3D4K / 8K / UHDTV materials in various high-end delivery and mezzanine formats.
Colorfront has successfully collaborated with NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories in Japan, using Colorfront Transkoder 2014 on 4K/60p broadcast programming, originated with Sony F55 and RED cameras, and also at 8K/60p on NHK’s Super Hi-Vision/ UHDTV project, with processing and real-time playback of 8K/60p footage from various RAW formats. Along with NHK, Colorfront has already sold multiple Colorfront Transkoder 2014 licenses to broadcasters and post facilities worldwide, including Deluxe, Technicolor, Fotokem, MGO and the BBC.
Along with real-time UHDTV 60fps/4320p/8K and S3D/2160p/4K capabilities, key features of Colorfront Transkoder 2014 are: a brand new, easy-to-use interface; a multi-track timeline; EDL conform editing tools; support for subtitling; automatic watch folder processing; plus extended support for the latest digital cinematography camera formats, including ARRI Alexa 3.2K ProRes and Amira 4K ProRes, AJA Cion, plus Panasonic’s 4K Varicam V-RAW. Deliverables have also been extended to include AS-11 DPP, Apple licensed ProRes XQ, HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) H.265 and 10-bit H.264 video compression formats.
Supporting the workflow is Colorfront Engine, a state-of-the-art, automatically managed, wide-gamut, high dynamic range, color pipeline, bringing true plug-and-play simplicity to today’s complex multi-source, multi-deliverable production needs.
“Digital cameras are heading towards ever-higher resolutions, framerates and dynamic range, and Colorfront continues to expand the boundaries of what is possible by delivering unique tools with extreme performance for UHDTV applications,” said Aron Jaszberenyi, managing director of Colorfront. “Colorfront remains at the forefront of the marketplace by maximizing the latest advances in CPU/GPU performance, supporting the latest high-end camera and deliverable formats, and delivering significant improvements to the user-experience.”
Transkoder is the ultimate tool for DCP and IMF mastering. It also includes the industry’s highest performance JPEG2000 encoding/decoding, 32-bit floating point processing on multiple GPUs, mxf wrapping, accelerated checksums, AES encryption and decryption, IMF/IMP and DCI/DCP package authoring, editing, transwrapping and verification, full subtitle authoring and support for multi-language packages.
Colorfront Transkoder 2014 is shipping on Windows now and on Mac OS X in Q4. Colorfront is showing Transkoder 2014 in private demos at IBC 2014.