Probably one of the biggest announcements of IBC this year (at least in terms of the digital intermediate industry) was the unveiling of Filmlight‘s Baselight version 3.0.
Read on for details of the new features.

3D additive and subtractive keyer. Baselight leverages FilmLight’s knowledge of 3-D colour space in a brand new 3-D keyer. Based on an all-new algorithm, the 3-D keyer isolates areas in different parts of the colour space and manages them within the same matte strip, allowing colourists to pull mattes through a secondary grade.
Audio support and field rendering. With the release of v3, Baselight will include key features required for video post-production, including support for scratch audio, as well as field rendering and 3:2 pull-down for video grading and deliverables.
Scene detector. Using sophisticated, fast image analysis, Baselight is able to break long form content into separate shots for easier shot-based grading, for times when there is no EDL available.
OpenFX plug-in architecture supported . With v2.2 FilmLight introduced Baselight support for effects plug-ins from third-party providers The Foundry (Tinder, Furnace and Keylight) and Photron’s Primatte through the Open FX SDK. Baselight v3 adds temporal support, enabling use of the full range of plug-ins .
Stack Manager. New one-button application of any grade type enables a flexible and efficient workflow. An inside/outside function allows rapid adjustment of areas within and surrounding any defined matte. Two sets of Keys and Shapes can easily be combined to create complex mattes. Layer control buttons allow multiple inside/outside layers to be defined and directly accessed within the current stack. Any number of additional layers can be accessed via the tablet and main UI. The effect is to greatly simplify the management of complex grade stacks.
Grain reduction. The matte based grain reduction feature offers a stunning demonstration of the power of the Baselight Four and Eight cluster systems, enabling real-time grain reduction of a vertical slice of a 2K image. This provides the colourist with a way to tune the grain reduction for each part of the image in real-time.

The new systems will also feature various hardware improvements, with Baselight Eight systems able to accomodate up to 48TB of storage, and boasting the capability to grade 2 real-time streams of 4k data. As an optional extra, the new hardware “Blackboard” control panel can be bought for Baselight 3.0. One of the things that appears to be absent from this list is the capability to view shots as node-based components, which is strange as almost every other competing product has this capability.

Due to be shipped by the end of the year, pricing for version 3.0 starts at $145,000 (upgrades are free to customers with a maintenance contract), with the optional “Blackboard” control surafce priced from $48,000. The booth at IBC was constantly packed full of people, so I didn’t actually get a chance to see it in action, but maybe I’ll be able to post a comprehensive review of all the new features some time in the future.

In other news, the fruits of Filmlight’s relationship with Avid were demonstrated, with the Truelight color management system integrated within Avid’s Media Composer Adrenaline, to provide a better visual representation of how the final production will look. Preliminary grading data can be transferred from the Avid into the Baselight conform, to allow the grading process to begin at the offline editing stage (although I’m personally not entirely sold on the usefulness of such a workflow).