Baselight 5.0 Release Party
About 2 months ago, I had the great opportunity to attend the Baselight 5.0 release party in Los Angeles. It was a perfect occasion to discover the new tools incorporated in this exceptional color grading system and to share with some Filmlight employees thoughts and ideas about their baby. Since I started embracing the world of color grading 5 years ago, Baselight has been one of the most obvious and prominent system in my mind when thinking about color grading. Some of the most renowned colorist swears only by Baselight, and there are good reasons for that. It is a very color focused platform unlike Davinci Resolve or Scratch, and it offers tools with - in my opinion - unequaled precision that allowed a great definition to finesse a grade. Using a version of Baselight Edition for Final Cut 7 was a perfect introduction to discover the potential of the beast, to learn how it feels and how it unleashes creativity. Visits at the Filmlight booth of the NAB was also a great opportunity to see where the product is going and to test out - drooling experience - the amazing color panels that Filmlight produces. Although there is the much more affordable version for Avid, Final Cut 7 and Nuke, Baselight still is a very hard platform to put your hands on when you start a career as a colorist. So, it was a great surprise to receive an invitation by the Filmlight team , for their Baselight 5.0 release party in Venice and a perfect excuse to drink a beer on a Tuesday night.
The evening quickly started with a demonstration by Peter Postma - Manager of the US branch of Filmlight - focusing on the new features developed for this new iteration. The 5.0 version is pretty rich in added features so I will be talking about the most interesting ones, although this is obviously personal.
First the main attraction of the night was the implementation of “Base Grade”. A new approach of the 3 way color wheel that is supposed to react closely to the way the human eye react to color and light and helping to achieve more natural looks. At the first glance it reminded me of the “12 way color wheel” of Speedgrade - R.I.P - with a 3 way color wheel for each tonal zone. From the demonstration it seamed that it helped to retrieve quickly details in the extreme highlight and shadow using an example with a lot of dynamic range. Unlike using a luma curve, this tool allow accurate tonal and contrast changes while keeping your eyes on the viewer - granted you are using a panel - . “Base Grade” brings also a different way of interacting with the color temperature and tint and saturation, again aiming a more natural feel of color adjustment. Although it seems really useful on paper and shown by Peter Postma, I think it is important to test it out and really have a feel for it.
The second add that impressed me was the paint tools. In one example shown, the cloning brush was really efficient in taking away a scar on the face of a talent, and the use for it just seems obvious. The paint tool also can be use to create a matte for any adjustment, and with the use of graphic tablet sounds like a very natural tool to use. Maybe a great way to recreate the use of dodging and burning the way it works in Adobe Photoshop. Although the paint strike are directly converted into a matte that is trackable, it appear to work better on fixed shot. Maybe if each strike would be turned into individual matte that automatically tracks to there own area this technic would work great on moving shot?
Another tool that was actually demonstrated paired with the paint tool is the frequency smoothing. It gives an easy and precise way of altering the smoothness of a specific frequency in the image and it gives you 7 zones of frequency to work with. when used subtle it did a wonderful job on smoothing skin. As a comparison, the same idea in DaVinci for skin smoothing would be a tiny bit more demanding:
cf: Benoit Cote wonderful powergrade
A color matching tool which name slept my mind could also be a really useful full and practical one. Selecting a specific color on one shot can be recall on another shot to match it automatically. As demoed with 2 different sky colors it perfectly match them in 2 click without altering the global balance of the shots. Definitely a neat trick to keep consistencies. A lot of Special effects tool came in Baselight 5.0 as well as the support for OFX plug in and the plethora of effect coming with it. It is now possible to warp an object with a grid that can be tracked with perspective, or to actually change the perspective of an object to compose it into a shot. Again really useful for quick last minute change at the color grading process.
There is a lot more to it than the tools explained but mainly about the implementation of new format and technology, more VFX tools and more workflow tools. Those didn’t wowed me but still might be as important.
The recent availability of Baselight Student will definitely help in seeing where those features can be use and how well they perform, but it already seems that Filmlight wants to keep Baselight as a high end color grading software that is both fast, intuitive - to a certain extend - and extremely accurate. From the rest of the night what I have heard from other colorists present is that although Baselight appear like a leading front for color grading, its prohibitive cost and its dependance on hardware are the main reason they aren’t switching right away. But as the employees said, Filmlight is a smaller company, and put a lot of efforts into making the best platform they can - and are doing a wonderful job at it - aiming at the high end of the spectrum. I hope more opportunity to try the full on software will come, but in the meantime there is always the student version to try, A great winter project!