Munich’s Iridas thinks its new SpeedGrade DI might have the feature set and the price point to beat competitors. All images © Iridas.

As toolsets homogenize and stabilize across the vfx industry, one of the most fertile areas of experiment and growth for both facilities and manufacturers over the past couple of years has been in Digital Intermediate (DI). In the space of a handful of years, it’s progressed from European art house experiment to the point where major studios are now confidently predicting that the majority of their releases will tread the DI path this year. In those same years DI has rapidly become a very crowded market too. As demand grows, a rash of new DI facilities are opening in the world’s movie production centers, and this year’s NAB will undoubtedly see more companies than ever before trying to pile into the DI space. Think non-linear editing in the early 1990s. DI in 2005 will see a similar rate of frenzied activity.

All this means that anyone trying to bring something new to the market is going to have its work cut out to be heard above the sheer level of background noise. And while there is no shortage of contenders, Munich’s Iridas thinks its new SpeedGrade DI software might just have the feature set and price point to metaphorically turn up its Marshall stack to 11.

The Mask Widget is an ingenious tool that makes it easy to quickly create, manipulate and animate masks. In some applications, animated masks are known as “Power Windows.”

Certainly those that have used it so far reckon it to be something special. Price Pethel, chief color scientist at Lowry Digital (The Star Wars and Indiana Jones DVD collections) and former creative director at Digital Domain, says: “In short, succinct words, it’s the future direction of how we will do this business.”

The Technical Argument
There are a couple of components to what makes SpeedGrade special, but we’ll start with the way it actually does DI.

First thing to point out is that it’s software only. Iridas has decided to let SpeedGrade piggyback on the usual developments in CPU and graphics card power. And while this means that it’s perhaps underpowered compared to some of the competition (most of which are significantly more expensive), Iridas has made it platform agnostic. Mac, PC or Linux, it’ll deploy on what you wish.

SpeedGrade DI supports up to nine Viewports, making it easy to compare multiple sequences or grading settings.

Its USP, though, is undoubtedly the way it operates on those platforms. SpeedGrade offer users a completely non-destructive way of working. The software saves all color, conform and compositing information as XML-based metadata alongside the unaltered source material. This means that users can save as many versions of each shot as they want at any stage in the production process without requiring any additional storage, before baking in the changes during one final session.

Pethel refers to it as off-line grading. “It allows you to make a lot of decisions on the grade throughout the post-production process, even from the original production level,” he adds. “You can involve the DP early on, which is great. They’re really frustrated at being left out of the process now. It’s all deferred to the end and usually by the time post is wrapping up, the DP is on to their next project, and in a lot of cases they’re not even invited back to see the finals of their work. This allows them to have a participation. They can encode their impressions and their feelings about their images very early on and that’s passed on as metadata. It’s a much more holistic view of how to do it all.