The main way that the use of the 3cP system will save production time and money is simply due to dramatically cutting down post-production time. For example, Ousama Rawi, BSC is using 3cP for his current project "The Tudors, Season 3" and they have budgeted about two weeks for color correction. When he uses 3cP, the time is cut down to two to three days. So not only is this cutting post-production cost, but it also speeds up production.

How easy is it for 3cP to incoporated into production?

3cP can be easily incorporated into any production. There are a few simple steps for both sides to take when bringing the 3cP system into the workflow. These steps are handled by us and we wil make sure every step necessary is completed before photography begins.

Yes of course. 3cP is extremely compatible with multiple forms of output files for any programs. We can output LUT files to Scratch, Lustre, Da Vinci 2K, Color Finesse, Pogle, LUTher, and many more.

The ASC CDL has the advantage of being "soft" with each color correction parameter being adjustable and removable. LUTs, on the other hand, have all color corrections combined into one big "blob" with no ability to later tweak or remove those corrections. Because color adjustments can easily be modified (or removed) without having to start over, the ASC CDL allows color decisions to be made progressively.

An initial set of looks can be designed during pre-production and saved as ASC CDLs. These can be applied on-set and tweaked to account for the actual scene in question, taking into account the final lighting, art direction, etc. that weren't locked down in pre-pro. These adjusted CDLs can be sent to the dailies colorist where they can be further tweaked in the more controlled environment of the color suite.

Finally, the dailies colorist's modifications can be saved as new CDLs and used by the DI colorist as the starting point for the final color correction. And, once again, all the settings are "soft" so they can easily be refined, adjusted for telecine vs. scan differences, etc.

At any point along the way the ASC CDL settings can be exported as a 3D LUT and loaded into a LUTher, GDP, PIP, etc. for live viewing of digital productions, or combined with existing print emulation LUTs (Truelight, etc.) for projection. Both 3D LUTs and the ASC CDL have important roles to play, but it's the "softness" and the cross-vendor support for the ASC CDL that is exciting.

The Proof Roll feature presents all of the color corrections done on set in editorial order, allowing the DP to finetune the color corrections before starting the DI session. The desired look may have evolved since production, and tweaks may be needed to ensure scene-to-scene continuity, so this extra step saves time performing the same tweaks in the DI color correction suite, potentially giving significant savings in time and money.

It's true that different display technologies have different visual characteristics that make it hard to acheive a precise match. The Sony BVM series of CRT monitors has long been considered the "gold standard" for use in color correction suites. Unfortunately, they are no longer being made, nor are many CRTs of any quality being made. The CRT is dead due to economic and environmental issues.

There are high-end LCD displays which approach the quality of CRT displays, and even exceed the CRT in some parameters. However, their cost make them impractical for use on the set. But even if you had a choice of the perfect monitor, other factors conspire to make sure that you will never have a precise visual match. The viewing environment, for example, is never perfect during production. There is probably not enough time to allow your eyes to adapt to whatever environment you do have. These and other factors outweigh any difference between monitors, ensuring that the display type is not the weakest link in the viewing chain.

Keep in mind that in communicating the desired look of the image, the intent is much more important than absolute numbers. The DP as an "artist" thinks in relationships between light and shadow, and relationships between colors and hues. As a great French painter Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix once said "Give me the freedom to use the paint of my choice for a background, and I'll make street dirt look like the skin of Venus." A cinematographer wants to preserve those relationships. They are his tools; the tools of his art.

An ability to "preserve" the cinematographer's vision in the form of RELATIONSHIPS (not absolute numbers!) between luminance and hues in the details of an image is one of the most important advantage of using an on-set color-correction system.

If the sky on a 3cP monitor on-set measures 25 foot-Lamberts and a face is 10 ft-L, and in the DI screening room the sky is 27 ft-L and the face is 11 ft-L, then to our "imperfect" eye it is a "perfect match"; the ratios are the same. It is how our eyes work. There is a law (called the Weber-Fechner law, dating back to the 19th century) that describes the difference between seeing things/objects and seeing their images; explaining the difference in perception of tones and colors. This unavoidable difference outweighs all the imperfections in monitors, viewing environments, etc.

It's more than just color. While there are many types of DPs, some of them really know what they have in mind, and what the image is supposed to look like. When they finish lighting, framing, etc., they have a very clear idea about what kind of contrast (lighting ratio) the fact of actor A must have, as opposed to the contrast of the face of actress B, and that the color of the shirt must be mauve as designed, not rose, and the sky on the background must be 2 stops below the key. And this was all thought through and designed, and needs to be seen in dailies, DI and in the DVD release. Those cinematographers are our main and repeat clients. And we give them tools not to look nice, but to keep their artistic integrity intact and transferable through all incarnations of the image.

3cP contains a built-in monitor calibration tool which you can use by itself or in combination with other calibration systems.

You can use a hardware calibrator like the Spyder Pro, but be sure you are calibrating to your intended delivery system (HD, NTSC, PAL) and not for pre-press use which may spec very different color temperature and gamma.

By using the built-in Apple calibration tool as the first step of calibration, and then adding our internal 3cP calibration tools, we can testify that Apple monitors are quite accurate, and able to show practically the same quality of image as any tele-cine monitor. We've demonstated this to many our clients--DPs and colorists both--using the G&D chart as a testing tool. The use of the chart as a calibration tool also showed to us long time ago that using the same numeric gamma and color temperature settings on the Apple monitor and in telecine does not provide the same visual result.

An important thing to keep in mind is that it's not just the monitor but also the video card that must be calibrated. The same monitor and calibration settings will look different on a different computer. That's why we always calibrate the card and monitor as a pair.

Practical experience--not just theory--shows that Apple monitors are capable of reproducing practically the full range of hue and colors comparable to the best telecine monitors, if they are used and calibrated properly, i.e. calibrated as a pair with the same computer, using software which allows you to calibrate the monitor more accurately than Apple's built-in utility. The resulting calibration should be checked periodically--visually and instrumentally--against the intended delivery system, by using as consistent test image such as the G&D chart, which contains calibrated gray patches with a predefined relationship between output millivolts and exposure.

The DI house is rarely chosen before production starts, so it's not clear at the start what type of color corrector the on-set component will be feeding. With 3cP we've tried to make it easy to defer the choice of DI house by allowing direct transfer of color information to a variety of color correction systems, including Scratch, Pogle, DaVinci/LUTher, Final Touch, Color Finesse, and others.

This lets the colorist quickly establish not only the basic look, but the specific look which the DP is after, and it's this factor which saves time during the DI grading process. Time that can represent either a cost savings, or an opportunity to further exploit the power of DI instead of doing basic color correction, or some combination of both. Of course, the colorist can also manually dial in the look based on the on-set grade, but because 3cP supports many color correction systems directly (with more in the future), we reduce the need for that manual step, thereby increasing the productivity of the colorist, allowing him more time to color.

(I use) photoshop on a macbook. …. how does it differ from what I've been doing up until now?

Unlike Photoshop, our software not only modifies still digital images to emulate film stock and film processing characteristics, but also creates a very precise electronic characteristic of the shot in the form of waveform monitor and vectorscope representations.

The 3CP-color corrected still images are seen by a telecine colorist on the same monitor that he or she sees the neg image on. Mind you, all technical information, a.k.a. metadata (waveform monitor and vectorscope graphs) is also available to the colorist. This combination of an image and data very precisely conveys the DP's intentions. What's more, the colorist can store the transfer information and easily recall the necessary setting as needed.

Needless to say, to achieve the results we produce, we very calibrate the on-set monitor to very closely match the monitor in the telecine suite where the actual transfer is to take place.