LIGHTING SPECIAL COLORIMETRY
A nyone who’s bought a light in the last few years might have concluded that the LED revolution has reached a point of maturity. However, people who have bought two lights during that time, especially if they’re from different manufacturers, might have identified some issues that need to be addressed. And anyone applying that technology to virtual production will be painfully aware of how difficult it can be to get any two things to look the same colour. Jon Miller is vice-chair of the Lighting Committee from the ASC’s Motion Imaging Technology Council, an organisation well-placed to help out. He describes the state of the art as pretty capable: “Most fixtures which are five-channel have come up with a combination of LED sources, whether that’s RGB plus warm and cool white, phosphor-converted reds, amber and cyan; whatever that combination is, you now get high-quality colour. Yes, there’s still an opportunity to keep iterating on that. There were once quite a few LED fixtures which were not achieving both full-spectrum white light and saturated colour at the level I thought necessary to be useful on films. But we have crossed that threshold, I think. “Now it’s really a question of control, and allowing the user to exploit that hardware,” Miller proposes. “I think the issues became clear around 2018, as the real onrush of multi-chip LEDs became widely adopted across film and TV products. It became clear that not only were there issues with matching, there are now ways to do something about it. With two white light emitters, there weren’t many levers to pull, so there wasn’t much interest in addressing it. Now fixtures can match others.” It’s clear, though, that this sort of initiative doesn’t need to keep anyone from exploring the outer edges of a light’s capabilities. “End users can choose to go beyond the matching abilities and use them for other things,” Miller confirms. “We’re not a standards committee, so these would all be best-practice-type documents, but we’re addressing three challenges. There’s a colour science subcommittee to figure out which is the most practical and useful colour space recommendation. Then we have
integrated systems, which look at virtual production, but overall their remit is control systems. The last one is education and outreach. The issue is that, frankly, it’s going to take years to roll out across the industry and for people to understand it.” To date, much of the committee’s work has been behind the scenes, but Miller expects to see more public engagement soon. “We have a bit of an iceberg problem with the committee: it’s all happening under the surface. The education and outreach part is where hopefully you’ll start to see some movement in the next 18 months. Despite the fact a lot of work has been done, it’s been done internally. Everyone involved is a volunteer – and the R&D schedules of manufacturers represent a not- insubstantial investment.” That creates a complex situation, which has only recently started to see solutions. Anyone with a need for advanced colour control in 2024 might consider the technology that’s being applied to virtual production, bringing post-production tools to the lighting department. Mazze Aderhold handles product design and worldwide support for Assimilate’s Live FX, which makes it possible for background plates, 3D rendered scenes and lighting effects to interact with huge flexibility for both technical and creative adjustments. “You can flag your video clip with a colour space, and you can also flag your display output that goes to an LED wall, and Live FX will convert from one to the other – and it’s the same for individual lights, which can be tagged
Phil Rhodes takes a look at the challenges & solutions for achieving LED colour control
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