Black Photon and Cooke Optics had a great pleasure to participate in The International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography EnergaCAMERIMAGE – one of the most recognized polish festivals dedicated to the art of cinematography and its creators, cinematographers. It was an amazing festival with lots of our activities as speakers at many seminars: HDR, SMPTE, AMPAS ACES and SONY.
Black Photon & Cooke Optics cooperation
This year’s Camerimage was special for Black Photon. We were invited to a number of events where we were able to showcase our skills and knowledge. Throughout the festival at Hotel 1231 in Torun, together with Cooke Optics we took part in an amazing experience where operators tested Cooke lenses in a specially prepared shooting space that allowed day and night shooting. There were five different professional cameras available to the operators from manufacturers such as ARRI, SONY, RED, Fujifilm and Panasonic.
Every hour, the invited operators tested their chosen lenses on selected cameras in their own way. We then took over the camera cards, made backups and prepared the data for colour correction. Our Dailies Lab was equipped with two stations: one for data offload and backup and the other for colour correction. We performed colour correction in both SDR and HDR as requested by the operators. The colour corrected material was then exported and presented in the cinema room. Both the source and colour corrected material is available to the operators for their further screenings.
The joint aim of Cooke and Black Photon was to create the conditions for complete lens testing from lens to screen. Over the course of six days, a number of cinematographers from around the world carried out the tests.
Data management experts
Black Photon has been involved in data management on sets since its inception. Our team has many years of experience in this subject. As a post-production company, we have developed methods for secure data management over the years, which we have also implemented in our Dailies Lab.
Hardware-wise, we are also equipped with fast and secure tools that allow us to efficiently secure as well as process data from the set. Our high-performance arrays in RAID6 as well as LTO libraries ensure that data is secure and deposited in various technologies. As part of the Dailies Lab, we perform all necessary operations on the data, such as transcoding for editorial or to dailies platforms. We also provide our proprietary platform for dailies – Fisheye, which assures secure and controlled access to the on-set material. Our Dailies Lab has been used in both Polish and foreign productions, ensuring that our assumptions were correct and in line with industry expectations.
We like to share our knowledge
In parallel with our work with Cooke, we had a number of presentations and seminars where we presented our knowledge, workflows and experience.
- We appeared with Dolby and CSI talking about HDR, the challenges of this technology and how to adopt it both on sets and throughout the post-production process of films and series.
- We hosted a meeting of SMPTE (Kamil Rutkowski is a SMPTE PL chairman), where we talked about the goals of SMPTE but also about the need for education, networking and also the need to help our industry in Ukraine.
- Together with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, we talked about ACES, our long-standing experience with it and the need for archiving as a method for the survival of audiovisual works.
- Together with SONY, we talked about the advantages of RAW materials in the form of X-OCN and how they have an impact on quality, but also how they can optimise the cost of media.
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