Warner Bros. Animation department used Quik Pix Inc.s ColorBlind color management software (recently upgraded for use on Linux platform) to render the SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS animated motion picture, a Nickelodeon/Paramount production to be released on Nov. 24, 2004.
Warner Bros. reported significant savings in time, material and labor during the animation phase of the film.
"Color sets the mood for everything in this film, where animation requires outrageous colors," said John Capezzuto, QPI's ceo. "ColorBlind's CBB-ICC software, from QPI's Software Products division, used in the production of the soon to be released animated movie, provided their Warner Bros.' feature animation technology specialists the software tools and creative freedom to select from a wider range of colors, and the confidence to know that the colors would reproduce faithfully. ColorBlind ensured consistent and repeatable color matches between, frames, artwork, scanned images and film output. Additionally, the software allowed the automation of the color workflow in the production of the film," Capezzuto added.
Prior to the use of ColorBlind, Warner's estimated two hours of production time for manual color correction for each of the images. Using ColorBlind's CBB-ICC software reduced manual color correction time to almost zero. Each frame, that would normally have to be output 3-4 times to obtain optimal color rendering, could be completed with one or two takes. To handle the large quantity of frames, Warner Bros. needed ColorBlind's batch processor to manage the workload and ColorBlind Parachute, a color engine, to translate between each device in the process.
Bill Baggelaar, head of technology, feature animation, wrote, "First, I want to say thank you very much to all of you for efforts in porting this code. We have used it on our first SPONGEBOB trailer film-out, and we are very happy with the results. Using our Linux renderfarm in conjunction with Shake (for image conversions), we were able to process approximately 2,300 frames of film in approximately 15 minutes!"
CBB-ICC, designed for the animation and gaming industries, now runs on multiple platforms, including Sparc, SGI, Linux and Windows N. CBB-ICC is an image processor that takes a source and destination profile, creates a link profile (a profile allowing device-to-device conversion) and embedes this information to a tiff file or a series of tiff files stored in a folder. It then applies the same source and destination profiles to a series of images, dramatically reducing the time required to process individual frames, one by one, using PhotoShop or other image processing software.
Established in 1982, QPI (www.colorvisuals.com) is a subsidiary of Dalrada Financial Corp. Located in Buena Park, California, QPI provides a spectrum of services to produce fine color visuals, both digital and photographic, using state of the art technology. Its premier product, the patented PhotoMotion images multi-image transparencies, is a unique color medium that uses existing originals to create the illusion of movement and allows for three to five distinct images to be displayed with an existing lightbox. QPI visual marketing products are sold to a wide range of varied clientele including advertisers and their agencies.
Quik Pix produces, develops, manufactures, licenses and distributes high-quality digital imaging, color management and color profiling solutions for everyone from major corporate customers to individuals using the Internet. It serves the worldwide needs of digital imaging with its award winning ColorBlind products (www.color.com).
