|
Hey Andrew!
I have been following the product for quite a long time now (and surely for longer than anybody at Autodesk :D) and I think Grand Master Dave Cole has been there a couple of weeks before myself, he might ping in the discussion.
At the beginning Lustre was SACC (Standalone Color Corrector that gives you your sacc_data, but SACC doesn’t sound that well), a standalone version of the IFFS Sparks from Colorfront. Some guys (I believe the Weta guys who were starting LoTR) had asked them to do a standalone as it didn’t make sense to run a Flame or Inferno just to do CC, and it was running on SGI hardware. As the sparks were distributed by 5D that was at that time putting on the market a serious Flame killer wannabe on PC in the name of Cyborg, they also produced a Windows/PC version that was technically even faster and it was presented confidentially at IBC 2001. Eclair Laboratoires saw the demo and went for an evaluation, I was working for the french 5D distributor so I was in charge of putting that together. It went really well, to the point they bought a first one (in the meantime it was marketed as Colossus, 5D had very cool marketing at a time when Discreetodesk was getting really uncool) in 2002 and a second one a couple of months later. We also built a full infrastructure/workflow there that was quite advanced and the throughput was quite amazing. At the same time Weta was in full Hobbit mode and at some point Efilm also had their own version. IBC 2002 saw the crumbling down of 5D and a couple of months later Discreet became a distributor of the Colorfront technology this time marketed as Lustre (less cool, but I can tell you it could have been worse).
So there was:
-Lustre 1.0, basically Colossus 1.0 with a discreet skin (less readable)
-Lustre 2.0 could hardly tell the difference, but someone had fun at changing a lot of
-Lustre 2.5 (that was seriously better, really fast and some cool features: inside-outside, L-S curves, multiple geoms) see: http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/dis...digital-colour-t2613.html
-Lustre 2.6 (worse release of all times on Windows, tons of bugs and new XML based cuts that wouldn’t work for change cuts as well as the older one...)
-Lustre 2.7 on Linux only, basically Lustre 2.6 with the introduction of Incinerator, the über-geeky cluster version of Lustre.
-Lustre 3.0/2007 on Windows and Linux, was really bad on Linux. The Wiretap workflow introduced in 2.5 starts to be usable to some extent, introduction of GPU acceleration for grading. Also introduction of the Autodesk Control Surface, that comes with some good ideas (but not only).
-Lustre 2008 (Windows only) introduction of timeline and stereo toolset, some design problems but the starting of code cleanup makes it way better than 2007.
-Lustre 2009: introduction of the new project configurator to look more like IFFS, integration of Wiretap Gateway to stream compressed footage (including R3D), serious code cleaning makes it a good workhorse
-Lustre 2009x1: couple of enhancements and bug fixes here and there
-Lustre 2010: introduction of the degrain tool and caching, better management of R3D debayering, multi-track timeline
For the list of movie that’s something ADSK had started at some point, but they were never as good as Baselight or some other competitors in showing them, despite for a long time it was the most common DI system in the world. They couldn’t claim either for the Efilm movies until there was an official announcement in 2007 http://www.pr-inside.com/autodesk-provides-digital-color-grading-r94360.htm
For the list of companies using it, well I guess it won’t be easy to put together, I know a couple of them, the TIG http://tig.colorist.org is trying to put together a map of the different grading facilities in the world, that may be a starting point.
So I guess that’s the holiday season story of Uncle C, the one to tell around the Christmas tree with the cracking logs in the fireplace (and obviously Flame and Smoke are around too :D). I have some good stuff from the era, the Colossus 1.0 setup file, the Desktop background, the doc (I maintained it for a couple of months during the transition from 5D to Discreet) some 5D Tshirts. Actually I’d love to find the original posters they had done for Cyborg and Colossus.
Cheers,
C
Cedric Lejeune
pipelines&workflows
http://www.workflowers.net
|
