Lustre 2007 adds functionality to do it all, if you can afford it.

I was very rightly called out for missing Lustre 2007 (Cheers Roger) off my list of Autodesk updates. The reason being is that I often feel with Final Touch you have a good solution at a fraction of the price. Granted FT doesn’t quite match up to Lustre or Baselight. But for a FCP workflow or working with Indies, corporate films and/or broadcast FT is perfect when compared to Pogle or similar. Baselight and Lustre find their niche in commercials, high-end VXF driven Broadcast and Features. I think that market will drive the investment in these systems.  But when you’ve bought a Baselight or Lustre and are doing a fair bit of high-end DI, what do you do when lower budget work (video work) is still the bread and butter. Nats here in London, have a Baselight that is a few years old and I seem to remember they had to do a fair bit of giggery pokery to get it set up to handle what is a predominantly low end TV client base. Enter Lustre 2007.

One of the biggest developments with Lustre is its flexibility. With Lustre you can work in a variety of ways, depending on your acquisition and delivery. Of course it can do shit hot 4K grading, but you would expect it to at the price. But according to a press release that has been circling the tech sites, it now offers the possibility to ‘to start from a 2K resolution master and generate re-formatted primary grade HD and standard-definition deliverables without the need for successive, time-consuming render passes’. In Studio Daily’s coverage of the update, they follow the much touted trails at Digital Pictures who worked on the upcoming Macbeth Pamela Hammond, head of Post at Digital Pictures described their pleasure at this new functionality as it provided them with ‘a key advantage for versioning, since multiple aspect ratios can be created with the same color-corrected images and the same dirt fix can be applied in one pass with its onboard tools’.

Greater versioning stems from one of the key scalability features of Lustre 2007 as Independent Film reports ‘colorists can capture, render and play out interlaced or progressive video material… making it the ideal solution for many types of grading projects. With support for true field-based rendering, interlaced video can be graded using animated roto shapes, animated repositioning or resizing and displayed in 10-bit video on a broadcast monitor, without flickering’. Working with interlaced footage gives added advantages for the broadcast market as well as being able to reversion your feature for TV distribution at the same time as the master grade.

Finally, if you have Flame or Smoke Suites you can ‘round trip’ with lustre over Wiretap. This means you can start grading once you begin to online as you can access the shots over the Stone Network. This creates a bit of a conundrum when looking at workflow. I think the whole, FCP, Smoke, Final Touch XML interchange is quite good, giving options to online in FCP or Smoke depending on budget and level of effects and easily moving into the Final Touch Grade from either place. Lustre it would seem could offer the same options. Both are good workflows, I don’t think anyone in London is using them to their full potential however. I suppose the answer for which to implement in your facility comes down to type of output, budgets, client expectations and most importantly the human operating the machine!

Below is the features at a glance found on the Autodesk site

• Real-time primary color grading of 10-bit and 16-bit 2K scans


• GPU-acceleration offering:


• Real-time preview of numerous key selective color correction operations


• Real-time formatting or video deliverables from 2K resolution film frame to HD/SD 10-bit video via the NVIDIA® SDI output at mastering quality


• Dual-head grading mode to grade interactively using the reference monitor


• Resolution independence (including 4K)*


• Uncompromised quality: 32-bit/component processing


• Printer light color timing mode (calibratable to lab process)


• Unlimited vector shapes, keying, and multi-point tracking in secondaries


• Advanced GMask vector shape tools for non-uniform light and color fall-off


• Integrated motion tracking and stabilization


• Visual timeline—conform and editing capabilities


• Integrated support for the Kodak Display Manager


• Open 3D-mesh calibration engine with support for ARRI®, Imagica®, Rising Sun Cinespace as well as custom color management systems


• Fast, automated motion-compensated dust busting tools


• Nonlinear, collaborative workflow


• Support for interlaced or progressive media


• Powerful collaborative workflow between Lustre and Autodesk® Smoke® or Autodesk® Flame®


• DDR slave control via rs422 connection


• New XML Delivery Grade File for primary grading interchange


• Real time primary grading output for preview dailies application


• Support for a broad range of video formats as well as drop-frame timecode support

*Lustre HD is limited to 2K resolution images on input and 1920x1080 resolutions on output