Cinnafilm partners with Technicolor on HDR conversion solution

Cinnafilm Partners With Technicolor To Provide HDR Conversion Solution For Incredibly Vivid Deliverable Content

ALBUQUERQUE, NM — Cinnafilm and Technicolor announce a technical partnership to combine their unique strengths and abilities in image processing and color conversion to create an unparalleled solution for content owners, creators, and providers. The joint solution will provide an incomparable file-based solution for high-quality High Dynamic Range (HDR) conversions from Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) source material, breathing fresh life into SDR libraries for OTT delivery, and streamlining editorial and production workflows for non-HDR content to be more seamlessly edited into native captured HDR material.

Cinnafilm is integrating Technicolor Intelligent Tone Management (ITM) and Advanced HDR by Technicolor (also known as SL-HDR) as a feature set upgrade to the conversion capabilities of the renowned Dark Energy noise and texture management toolset. Technicolor ITM is an algorithm that tone maps and up-converts SDR video into a native HDR format. Dark Energy can remove digital noise and film grain from moving pictures without harming image detail, and can also effectively replicate any film emulsion or broadcast texture for a pleasing final image, a technology used for over a decade in many of the most prestigious post facilities around the world. Jointly, this offering will bridge the gap between existing SDR workflows and source content material and the ever-increasing demands for HDR delivery.

“We have been active in live production over the past several years with Advanced HDR by Technicolor; however, we needed a strong partner in file-based production that would add other aspects of the video toolchain like noise reduction. We believe partnering with Cinnafilm and combining the features of Dark Energy and PixelStrings to be a compelling solution for our customers,” says Kirk Barker, SVP of Emerging Products at Technicolor.

Cinnafilm’s CEO Lance Maurer says, “We have been involved with high-quality image processing workflows for some time, and we began in cinema where every detail, every frame, matters. After evolving our solutions for broadcast, it is exciting to be part of a new merge point for consumption in the form of home theater and OTT. We are thrilled to partner with Technicolor, a company known for its excellence and passion for picture quality. I see this as a perfect union of similar philosophies, and cinwe are thrilled to bring this new solution to market in 2019.”

Dark Energy with Technicolor ITM will be made generally available in Q2 2019, directly from Cinnafilm as part of its array of award-winning enterprise software solutions. This summer will see the extended release of the solution within Cinnafilm’s PixelStrings PaaS pay-as-you-go cloud service, winner of the 2018 Hollywood Professional Association Engineering Excellence Award. By Q4, the solution will be available from several of Cinnafilm’s OEM partners. Conversions from SDR to HDR video can be exported as SLOG3, HDR-10, or HLG. In addition, the tool will be able to down-convert from those HDR formats to SDR Rec 709 and distribution including Advanced HDR by Technicolor. Availability release date is anticipated to be NAB 2019.