TECHNOLOGICAL TRIUMPH Chris Deighton, Richard Mead, Adrian Jeakins and Evangelos Apostolopoulos win an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy award for the Tessera SX40 LED processor, a key player in VP
and live events work, something which can create very visible colour quality problems when the light from LED walls is allowed to fall on the foreground scene. Given that interactive lighting is a large part of the attraction of VP in the first place, panels incorporating a white emitter alongside the red, green and blue have been introduced – requiring some very new thinking from both panel manufacturers and Brompton, coming in the form of its TrueLight technology. “For a camera department going into an LED volume – if you’re not prepared for it – getting your actors on-set will give you a bad surprise when they all look like lobsters,” Jeakins warns. “You almost have to wash it out with conventional fixtures. Once you’ve seen it, you see it everywhere; you walk into a volume and the colours all look wrong.” Initially, TrueLight-compatible panels are designed mainly to create light without appearing on camera, although Jeakins predicts that finer-pitched video panels suitable for in-vision work should begin to appear later in the year. In a field which involves such vast cooperative technology, that collaboration is – as Jeakins concludes – crucial to initiatives just like TrueLight. “The partnership aspect is an extremely important contributing factor… once you have seen it fixed, you never want to go back. That’s what TrueLight is all about. “We have some new products coming, including a new processor on the way later this year. And we’re sure TrueLight will revolutionise workflows for crews on LED volumes.”
display mostly designed for viewing by eye. Correctly displaying a camera- specific log encoding on a monitor involves very much the same concern. But in VP, colour and brightness issues might affect both appearance on camera and matching with other lighting. An ad-hoc, project-specific approach has often been used – involving careful eyeballing and manual adjustment. Jeakins describes some encouraging progress toward standardisation. “The standards to do this are all in place,” he reports. “There’s a SMPTE standard for a great output transform, PQ, which is perfectly suited to LED walls. PQ gives you absolute luminance values in nits, assuming everything is set up correctly. You should get the brightness you expect from a given pixel, no matter which stage you are on. [And] if you have a system
like Brompton, which respects the colour space of your incoming video, you will get the colours you expect. Adoption of those standards will be very important.” Part of Brompton’s solution to standardisation in a field involving so many vendors is simply to engineer compatibility with various third-party hardware – a brute-force solution to an otherwise intractable problem. “We work with a variety of panel manufacturers, so there are a wide range of offerings at different price points,” Jeakins points out. ”We try as much as possible to keep our features agnostic to the panel manufacturer it’s being implemented in. You may be moving between volumes, but so long as it’s Brompton you should see the same thing.” A lot of VP technology is based closely on the displays built for advertising
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