Remote Collaborative Color Grading and Editorial ReviewWhen you are shooting a movie at tight schedule and need to accelerate your post production, then remote collaborative approach is a good choice. You don't need to have all professionals on-site because via remote approach you can collaborate with your teammates wherever they are located. Industry trend to remote solutions is quite clear and it happens not just due to the coronavirus. The idea to accelerate post production via remote operation is viable and companies tend to remove various limitations of conventional workflow - now the professionals could choose a place and a time to work remotely.
Nowadays, there are quite a lot of software solutions which could offer reliable remote access via local networks or via public internet. Most of them are built without an idea about professional usage at post production. Nevertheless, in color grading and editorial reviewing we need to utilize professional hardware which can visualize 10-bit and 12-bit frames. Most of existing video conference solutions (Skype, ZOOM, OBS) are not capable of doing that, so we've implemented a software to solve that task. Remote color grading with existing hardware appliancesThere are quite a lot of hardware units (encoding-decoding and IP streaming solutions) which could offer high performance and low latency workflow to solve the task of remote color grading. These are fully-managed remote collaborative solutions for high-quality, realtime color grading, editing, digital intermediates and approvals:
These fast and quite expensive hardware appliances are not always available, especially if you are working from home. Below we present a software solution which is capable of running on conventional PC and be able to meet all requirements for remote color grading in terms of image quality, performance and latency. How we do Remote Collaborative Color Grading?User has two screens: for the shared content and for video conferencing. The first screen is able to visualize 10/12-bit images to see the result of color grading, the other is necessary for access to remote PC, where color grading software is running. We offer cost-effective software solution which is able to record, encode, transmit, receive, decode and visualize various transport streams and SDI signals. To ensure 24/7 operation with an ability to create and to process 2K live SDI streams with visually lossless encoding, we've applied the JPEG2000 (J2K) compression algorithm, which could be very fast on NVIDIA GPUs. Basic live workflow for collaborative remote color gradingVideo Source (Baseband Video) -> Capture device (Blackmagic DeckLink or AJA Kona) -> SDI unpacking on GPU -> J2K Encoder on GPU -> Facility Firewall -> Public Internet -> Remote Firewall -> J2K Decoder on GPU -> SDI packing on GPU -> Output device (Blackmagic DeckLink or AJA Kona) -> Video Display (Baseband Video). Technical info for the live workflow
That basic workflow covers just the task of precise color visualization. Color grading is actually done via remote access to a PC with installed grading software. This is not difficult to do, though we need to be able to check image quality at remote professional monitor with high bit depth. Values for Collaborative Remote Color Grading
Technical requirements
J2K Streaming: j2k encoder - transmitter - receiver - j2k decoder
Security and content protection
It's possible to encrypt both video and audio with 128-bit AES encryption with symmetric key without any increase in a stream latency. Please note that the encryption currently ensures only confidentiality. As a hash, CRC-32 is used, so it doesn't guarantee cryptographical integrity. Low latency transport for realtime streaming
Maximum performance for JPEG2000 compression and decompression features could be achieved with multithreading at batch mode. This should be done to implement massive parallel processing according to J2K algorithm. At batch processing mode we need to collect several images, which is not good for end-to-end latency. Here we have a trade-off between performance and latency for the task of JPEG2000 encoding and decoding. For example, at remote color grading application we would be interested to have minimum latency, so we need to process each J2K frame separately, without batch. Though in most cases it's better to choose acceptable latency and get the best performance with batch and multithreading. JPEG2000 performance measurementsWe have very fast JPEG2000 codec which is working on NVIDIA GPU. Standard CPU-based JPEG2000 codecs like OpenJPEG are too slow and they are not acceptable for realtime applications with low latency requirements. Currently, our JPEG2000 encoder is faster than J2K decoder, so total performance is limited by JPEG2000 decoding. On NVIDIA Quadro RTX A6000 the software can offer 24 fps and more for 4K resolution at 12-bit HDR with 4:4:4 subsampling. In the case with 2K resolution, the software could achieve more than 60 fps. The performance depends on GPU model and on parameters of JPEG2000 encoding, etc. We suggest to test network bandwidth and software latency to choose the best parameters. CompetitorsOur software is offering an approach for low-latency remote collaborative color grading. Please note that this is not actually the software for color grading. This is the solution to work remotely with conventional grading, VFX and post production software like Blackmagic Davinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, AVID Media Composer, Baselight, etc. We don't compete with these color grading applications at all. We would recommend utilizing TeamViewer, AnyDesk, Zoom, OBS, Google Remote Desktop, Ammyy Admin, Mikogo, ThinVNC, UltraVNC, WebEx Meetings, LogMeIn Pro, which could offer remote access to PC with color grading software, but they are able to work with just 8-bit color frames instead of 12-bit color. This is the key difference. As soon as for high quality post production we need to work with 12-bit color, that requirement is essential and the task or low latency collaborative solution with acceptable compression ratio is very important. Still, any software from the above list is useful to ensure an access to remote PC. Hardware-based solutions like Nevion, Streambox, Sohonet are our competitors. These are reliable and very expensive hardware-based solutions. Our approach needs less hardware and could offer high quality, low latency and much cheaper solutions for remote collaborative color grading and post production. Other info about JPEG2000 and digital cinema applications |