[Tig] Universal Color Metadata challenge

[Joe Owens]

I guess this is a little bit along the lines of a field grading  
system that 'passes along' a suggested correction to dailies, etc.,  
as to how the DP wants to see the film/data printed for editing.  But  
these are platform-centric.  I sometimes wondered about how to imbed  
a correction in the header of a DMin/DMax scan so that the original  
value is the only data that is transmitted... but a little file that  
tags along says "someone made a judgement that they thought these  
adjustments made the picture look nice".  Instead of being stuck in a  
final with crushed values.
      It would be great if everyone had a calibrated environment in  
which they could make these judgements, too.  But I think it has also  
been conveyed that color manipulation is more than fiddling the  
numbers.  The eye-brain cares not a whit for the numbers.  But this  
proposal is sort of for a color "EDL" so that a correction pulled in  
Final Touch, oops, I mean AppleColor, can be transmitted to a daVinci  
or a Scratch, or a Lustre...   actually we can sort of do that  
between AVID and Final Cut now... but imperfectly.. geez the only  
really infallible EDL transfer is the old CMX V1 list...  but it  
isn't really all that descriptive when you get down to it.

Reductio ad absurdum, yes all the colour correction systems do the  
same thing -- change the values --  but even daVinci gave up trying  
to redo the plumbing between 8:8:8 and 2K...  no Power Tiers  
(multiple windows) for the former system... really the EdWin was a  
major handful and gave only a few pixels of softness on the edges.   
Not remotely close to the splineable user shapes nearly everyone else  
is offering these days -- how does one forward-compensate for that  
kind of a development?

I know!    How about a "points" system, where R, G, and B are given a  
valuing system between 1 and 50, and depending on the intensity of  
each hue.....


Joe Owens
Presto!Digital Colourgrade
302-9664 106 Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta T5H0N4
+1 780 421-9980
jpo at prestodigital.ca