NEW HORIZONS Ensuring believable lighting and colour was a balancing act for the team in creating a living, breathing world
and programmer, balanced control of fixtures between his media server and lighting console; Aputure provided support on how to do that. We knew both the colour model of our lights plus video colour space, establishing the settings in Assimilate Live FX and on the fixtures. Everything was talking the same colour language: it became a fully transparent artistic process for the DOP.” Terms like colour space are more familiar in discussions of monitoring than lighting; most people are familiar with the idea of telling a monitor what sort of camera is in use so a log image will look as it should. Controlling lights with video images engages very similar issues, and it’s crucial everything understands which shades of red, green and blue are being used as primary colours. Adopting techniques used in video signals, Kang suggests, keeps everything simple. Still, the most common
standards for high-definition video – which is encompassed in the ITU’s recommendation BT.709 – might not give modern lighting devices as much room to operate as they could use. “Video language is very clearly defined, and there are varying flavours of these languages called colour spaces which are employable to control lighting data. They started with Rec. 709 but that’s only one dialect.” More recent standards such as Rec. 2020, which was developed for HDR television, describe a wider range of colours. “We are coming out with video profiles which will take out this complication, so anyone can use a console with standard Rec. 709 files – or encode a Rec. 2020 file and have our fixtures work with it.” Away from esoteric worlds of talking alien planets, Kang has found ways for image-based lighting to bring the
subtlety of the real world to much more conventional set-ups, without requiring too much complexity. “We had what we call a FLEX (film lighting experience) event in January, in LA. I had ten one- foot INFINIBARs constructed to become a window. I attached a show card – that way, I could pixel map anything to the ten lights and any window image, so it was a window to the world. The reflections looked like windows and it was all wireless; I had it all on CRMX. “Now, it doesn’t have to be a science experiment,” Kang reflects. “The technology is here. You’ve got the spectrum and the colorimetry you need, and cameras with the ability to capture the world and stitch it all together. Just as long as the colour management workflow is figured out, the creative activity of image-based lighting – using image to light the world – becomes its own real craft.”
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