Autodesk Lustre software helps this multi-facility German post-production company meet and exceed customer demand.

One of Europe’s largest and most revered film laboratories has placed Autodesk® Lustre® software digital grading systems at the heart of its integrated network of digital post-production facilities. CinePostproduction, a subsidiary of CineMedia Film AG, has installed a Lustre HD Station at its Berlin branch to complement a Lustre Master Station and Lustre HD Station at Geyer Berlin and a Lustre HD Station at Geyer Cologne.



“Quite simply, our clients are asking for it,” explains Ivar Beer, Digital Lab and Digital Post Production Manager, Geyer Berlin. “We were a Pogle house until a couple of years ago when our clients began to demand Lustre and, in particular, the benefits of nonlinear digital intermediate workflows. Crucially, they also appreciate the flexibility of working resolution independent.”

Founded in 1911, CinePostproduction has built a reputation for quality post-production, and the delivery of series prints and trailer duplicates for cinema releases. The group, which also includes its branches Atlantik Hamburg, Bavaria Bild, Ton Munich, and Geyer Cologne, offers a range of services, including film laboratory, digital laboratory, digital post-production, and sound studios. It has handled numerous blockbuster productions, among them the full post and sound mix for 2007 Foreign Language Academy Award Winner The Lives of Others.



Its digital post-production services include everything from film scanning, offline and online editing, retouching, color grading, 2D and 3D animation and compositing, to visual effects and title editing.



“Lustre fits perfectly within our existing facility set up,” explains Ivar. “We use Smoke for conform and online and Flame for effects. Source material can be graded in Lustre before, during, or after editing and compositing, and then published to the Smoke/Flame clip library or our SAN. That gives us supreme flexibility in being able to work on the same project with different tools yet share timelines and media with no time-consuming rendering. That’s a true nonlinear workflow. In essence, the editorial and digital intermediate color sessions can happen simultaneously, making our clients very happy.”



CinePostproduction Berlin is using two Lustre systems in tandem with two Barco® 2K DP90 KP projectors for processing Digital Intermediates (DIs) and for complex requirements in the color grading of feature film and TV movie productions. Forthcoming 90-minute feature Dr. Alemán was graded with Lustre and printed onto 35mm via Arrilaser as well as delivered as a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) for digital projection.



“The film was shot on location in Colombia, where the variable weather presented the DoP with tricky lighting conditions,” explains colorist and compositing artist Sebastian Göhs. “The main challenge was in giving the lighting a consistency and matching the skies from scene to scene.”



Sebastian is a rising young star of Geyer Berlin. One of the features in Lustre that he particularly appreciates is the new shape or "region tracker." “This is such a cool function,” he says. “You only need to draw a shape and the software will automatically track it for you. Automatic scaling and rotation of geometries and freehand shapes makes it faster than ever to track elements of a scene. The majority of Lustre’s functions are GPU-accelerated, which is fantastic for client-attended sessions. The less you’re shuttling back and forth, the more you can do in real time, which means the client is happier and less likely to ask why a look takes so long!”

Ivar adds: “GPU acceleration gives us real-time performance for plug-in effects or applying masks. This overall speed plus enhancements such as shape tracker are important for us especially when we manage TV movies which don’t have the luxury of a lot of time to post-produce. We don’t have much more than two or three days per project so we’re working around the clock in over-lapping shifts.”



Lustre was also used by Sebastian to grade the acclaimed Israeli animated feature Waltz with Bashir, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year. Directed by Ari Folman, the film is a daring attempt to bear witness to an atrocity committed during his stint in the Israeli army in 1982.



“The director had filmed real actors and recreated the live action using different techniques, including rotoscoping, animated vector shapes, and 3D animation,” says Sebastian. “The biggest problem for the DoP was that the result was too ‘sharp’ so we had to grade it to make the picture a little softer.”



The grading of DIs with Lustre is undertaken in the same way across CinePostproduction’s sites. Each Barco projector is equipped with 3D color lookup tables (LUTs) developed by Kodak in line with CinePostproduction’s requirements—enabling each facility to exchange 3D LUTs in a seamless and collaborative manner.



“Our workflow isn’t set up to perform film out from all branches, so what we do is receive the metadata from our other branches via email and apply it to the original scan held in Berlin and print from that. It’s so straightforward,” says Ivar.



“Lustre offers real time playback for primary color grading and extends the possibilities for secondary color grading in any resolution up to 4K and 16-bit color depth. It’s this resolution independence which is the key benefit of Autodesk’s technology,” says Ivar.



“We recently completed a commercial for Siemens which required us to match time-lapse digital still photos of various cities to create a skyline. We stitched together a series of 3K plates seamlessly at the edges and graded them in Lustre.”

Ivar sums it all up by saying: “The simple fact is that our clients and colorists prefer Lustre, so we’re responding to their needs,” states Ivar. “With Lustre at the heart of our multiple operations over the next year we aim to expand outside of Germany and capture much more attention from the international market.”



And with Lustre giving CinePostproduction's projects that extra sparkle, the rest of the world is sure to be spellbound.