Baselight

High-performance 4K colour grading

Baselight 4.4m1 is now available

Scroll down to read about some of the new features, or take a look at the Baselight 4.4m1 datasheet.
Existing customers can download the update from the Baselight Support page.

To watch a tutorial video about the changes to colour management in Baselight 4.4m1, visit the Colour Management page.

The world’s most powerful colour grading and finishing system for film, TV, commercials and broadcast. Compelling features and enhancements make Baselight even more creative, productive and invaluable to today's top colourists.

Generation VI Baselight hardware

FilmLight constantly evaluates the latest technology to ensure you can make the most of your investment in Baselight. That’s why Baselight 4.4m1 provides full support for the sixth generation of Baselight hardware.

As well as new systems, these generational changes—combining higher rendering & disk performance—are available as upgrades for current users too. Contact your local FilmLight sales representative for information if you would like to take advantage of this upgrade.

Varispeed handling

Baselight 4.4m1 provides a sophisticated framework to support variable speed events, enabling the colourist to integrate yet another important part of the finishing process:

• Fully keyframed “Time vs. Time” and “Velocity vs. Time” graphs with Bezier control points.
• Blackboard/Slate interface for creating and modifying graphs.
• Various rendering modes including advanced optical flow retiming.
• Direct conform of speed change graphs from Avid AAF and FCP XML.

XML conform for even greater flexibility

Baselight has a new conform engine. It separates the file system scan and the actual conform into two operations with an XML handshake between them. This gives you more speed and more options with:

• Sophisticated path matching using regular expressions.
• Conforming across multiple search directories.
• Multi-threaded scanning for faster conforms.
• Using command line conform to create new scenes.

The command line interface includes all the same options as the user interface conform, so it’s particularly useful for post facilities with their own internal scripted pipeline for job handling.

For more information, take a look at the Baselight 4.4m1 Reference Manual in the Document Library.

Subtitles

When you’re generating a DCP, you often need to provide subtitles just like in print distribution. Of course, you can provide a separate XML file but many short-run films and film festivals insist that subtitles are burnt in to avoid any issues.

To solve this problem, you can now add subtitles to your Baselight timeline in the Digital Cinema Interop (CineCanvas™) version 1.1 format.

Find out more in our Feature Tutorial.

Extensive Panel Support

Baselight supports an ever-increasing array of control surfaces including Tangent Wave and Element, and the Avid Artist Color and Transport.

And, of course, there’s our own Slate and Blackboard 2 panels, which can be completely customised using the Chalk application. Change the functionality of an existing button, or swap the locations of buttons to change the layout. You can even create custom buttons. From Baselight 4.4, the panels also suport multiple languages so you can work in your language.

Find out more in our Feature Tutorial.

Unrivalled Colour Space Management

Truelight Colour Spaces allow colour space conversions to be performed with the speed, accuracy, and dynamic range permitted by native floating-point GPU functionality. They can be defined externally of Baselight formats, and have a powerful function set that allows complex transforms formerly only possible with 3D LUT mechanisms.

You can find out more about Truelight Colour Spaces and how they support an ACES workflow on our Colour Management page, in our Feature Tutorial, or read our Workflow Guide.

Project consolidation

You can now consolidate all the material used in a list of scenes to one location—with optional handles.

In particular, you can conform EDLs against a list of external drives and tasks placed in Baselight’s render queue; this results in all the required media being copied or synchronised to the local storage. The scenes that reference material on the external drives are even edited automatically to reference the new local paths.

True-to-life video with Dolby Vision

We’ve partnered with Dolby Laboratories to provide high dynamic range (HDR) mastering and grading within Baselight using Dolby Vision. This technology, first shown at the recent CES exhibition, can be mastered in post-production using a combination of Dolby hardware and FilmLight software with a licence from FilmLight.

Direct DCP rendering

Baselight’s sophisticated colour management system is the reason why many facilities have chosen Baselight to produce DCDM (Digital Cinema Distribution Master) XYZ TIFF files.

But now, with Baselight, you no longer need a dedicated third-party system to produce a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) from these files—you can preview and render it directly from the Baselight application itself.

Native Support for Common Encoding Formats

Baselight reads and writes almost all file formats natively, and even renders DCI-compliant JPEG2000 files natively so that you can incorporate them into a DCP (Digital Cinema Package) directly, using third-party tools.

Find out more in the Baselight 4.4 Codec Support datasheet.

Perfect for Stereo

Baselight has many features to make working with 3D projects a breeze.

Single Stereo Stack

Both left and right eye tracks are contained inside the same stack so that mattes and effects are applied to both tracks simultaneously. No need to sync your stacks.

Localised colour matcher

It matches any spatial colour differences found between the left and right eyes, providing for a more accurate match.

Depth histogram

Similar to the colour histogram, the depth histogram displays the disparity distribution in your scene. You can also create a Disparity Map to show the disparity between left and right tracks.

Find out more in our Feature Tutorial.

Working with Avid or Final Cut Pro?

Baselight lets you import an Avid AAF or FCP XML file directly to the timeline. You can then grade shots in Baselight and update the AAF or XML file with the new grade information. Import the updated file back into your editing system and you can access the graded shots straight away—no rendering required.

Heard about the BLG file (Baselight Grade file)?

It's a multi-track OpenEXR file that lets you create, transfer and review looks.

When we use the term 'look', we're not just talking about a LUT or a restricted grade—we mean the full creative intent, including conform metadata and keyframes.

Find out more in our Feature Tutorial.