Product: Baselight Grading System

Version: 2.0

Manufacturer: Filmlight

Price: Approx. $150,000 per license (approx $500,000 for Baselight Eight system) *

Performance & stability: 7/10 (9/10 for Baselight Eight)
Features: 7/10
Expected return on investment: 9/10
Support: 7/10
Longevity: 8/10
Flexibility: 7/10

Pros: Excellent performance out of Baselight Four, unbelievable performance from Baselight Eight, perfect for collaboration

Cons: Lack of audio is inexcusable, no painting option available

Bottom line: It’s designed for grading, and doesn’t pretend to be for anything else

Baselight 2.0

Filmlight is the company responsible for the highly acclaimed Northlight film scanner, and more recently the Truelight colour management system. Filmlight’s products are created by a number of people who have worked at various post-production facilities, most notably Framestore|CFC, who themselves have used Baselight to grade a number of feature films, most recently Enduring Love.

Baselight has been around for a while. My first experience was with a beta version in the middle of 2003, when it was being used on the feature Cold Mountain. I was surprised by its ease of use even back then, and there’s no doubt that the various revisions have improved upon the basic system immensely.

Baselight is offered in a number of different configurations, so in theory there should be something suitable for any scale of project. The basic license covers the software, which will run on any Linux-based system (no windows-based system is available). The software will handle images of mixed resolution and format, up to 4k in size. You probably won’t get realtime playback of 2k images with the standard Baselight system, but you can switch to smaller proxies which will normally playback reasonably well. We’ll cover the software in depth in a moment. There are two other configurations available, which combine a Baselight software license with a hardware platform. Baselight Four has four times the processing power of the standard Baselight system, and is able to handle 2k images in realtime, and makes working with 4k images significantly less painful.
Baselight Eight on the other hand, has a whole host of tricks in the box, and is somehow able to get around eight times the performance of the basic system, meaning that it is able to process 4k images in realtime, easily making it one of the fastest grading systems on the market.

The Baselight software is well laid-out, and easy on the eyes, particularly in the dark environments graders normally work in. It seems to borrow the design from Apple’s Shake compositing system, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Pretty much each element on the interface can be resized, and of course, the interface can span multiple monitors or run images full-screen mode, maximising the image area and removing the visible interface completely. Project management is handled sensibly through the use of a central database that stores versions for each project. This brings me onto an important point: Baselight allows multiple operators to work concurrently on the same project (though not necessarily on the same scene). This makes it easy for a colourist to grade a scene, whilst his or her assistant prepares the next scene, and the previous scene is rendered and output. However, this does mean that protection of the database files becomes crucial, as if it is corrupted somehow, all work will be lost.

On the I/O side of things, Baselight will input and output both digital files (of any resolution), and HD Video, and also allows live HD output, which means it can be used with HD monitors and projectors such as the 2k DLP range. The method of conforming in Baselight is a little unconventional. Baselight uses a proprietary Filmlight EDL format internally, but provides the ability to convert existing CMX3600 EDLs to a Filmlight EDL, which will also carry across optical effects such as dissolves. This also includes the use of film cutlists that use Keycode numbers- Baselight is able to conform scanned film images using Keycode, another feature unique to the system. In order for automatic conforming to work, the data must be organised to strict conventions, although direct editing of the Filmlight EDL file will allow for a much more flexible approach, including the ability to conform shots from multiple network locations. If at any time the desired shot cannot be found, Baselight will display a note in the image window showing the path of the shot it is missing, allowing it to be added, or the search path corrected.

One of Baselight’s strongest features is it’s vertical editing paradigm. Shots can be stacked on top of each other in the timeline, meaning that newer shots can supersede older ones without having to delete them, which is useful for versioning amongst other things. Further, any process, be it a colour correction process, or a mask, is assigned to a new track on top of the others, meaning that changes can be made to each process independently from the others, on every shot. Baselight even provides the ability for the operator to write notes attached to a particular shot, which appear on the timeline but not displayed on the output. The editing features are somewhat limited, there is no "trim" view for example, and no gestural editing capability, but it is possible to make any editing changes numerically within the program, such as slipping a shot by a few frames. You won’t be using Baselight to do offline editing, but it’s unlikely that any last minute changes to a conformed project will prove problematic. And thankfully, the latest version of Baselight provides a system for reconforming EDLs with significant changes, without having to lose all the work already done to the previous conform. Probably one of the strangest omissions though is that there is no support for speed changes. Both speed-ups and slow-downs must be done manually by editing them onto the timeline a frame at a time, or processing them in another application and importing them as a new shot onto the timeline.

Baselight allows for multiple image windows (up to nine of them) to be open at a time, which means that different versions of shot can be played side-by-side, or two or more different shots can be easily compared for accurate match grading. It also means that a digitised offline reference video can be played alongside the conformed version (there are a whole host of great display options, including a split-screen ability) for checking the cut. Sadly, and this is my biggest gripe with the system, there is no method for playing audio synchronised to the picture. This is a real shame, because it makes (amongst other things) panning & scanning much harder, and I couldn’t help but feel that it could be included in a very simple way, like the method used in Lustre.

And now we get to the colour grading options available to Baselight. Overall, the tools are not as extensive as those found in other systems, but most graders using Baselight assure me that it has enough to get the job done. Filmlight are fond of pointing out that Baselight is designed primarily for speed and performance, and they’ve definitely got it right on those counts. Colour management is handled by the included Truelight management system, which used 3D "Colour Cubes" to map the scanned film colour space onto the display colour space. The Truelight system is a good one, though it gives the best results when calibrated separately for each project.

Version 2 of Baselight allows for grading in "Film" or "Telecine" mode, which are used for logarithmic and linear colour spaces respectively. Film mode allows for primary grading of the exposure, gamma, and saturation with separate RGB controls for each. There are also controls to adjust the RGB of the "knee" and "toe" of the image (for adjusting the highlights and shadows respectively) and
for adjusting the pivot point, which modifies how the other controls work. Telecine mode gives colour wheels for the shadows, midtones, and highlights of the image, with separate controls for adjusting the RGB saturation, and pivot controls for the highlight and shadow point. In this respect at least, Baselight offers a very well-rounded set of grading tools.

Secondary colour correction comes in the form of a rudimentary keyer, and a shapes tool. These are each stacked onto one another in the timeline, and more grading can then be applied to the selected areas. It’s also possible to load alpha channels, or other matte images, which means that complex mattes can be created elsewhere and then imported into the scene. The shapes tool is powerful enough for most situations, allowing for the creation of lines, ellipses, rectangles and freehand shapes. The shapes can be easily positioned and edited directly on top of the image, and there are options to merge shapes together to create some complex shapes, such as circle with a square cut out of it, and each can be feathered and faded. Grades can be saved to a "gallery" and then applied to other shots by dragging-and-dropping them.

Almost all of the parameters can be adjusted over time, which accomplished by creating key-frames simply by clicking the appropriate button. Keyframes can be moved and changed between different types, such as linear or S-curve, but there is no way to adjust them precisely using bezier points for example, and though there is a keyframe "timeline" that visually shows the position of each keyframe, there is not a graph mode like in other systems. Shapes can be tracked to features in the image using one-point or two-point tracking, and though the tracker reference can be changed for each frame, there does not seem to be any way to manually adjust the tracked path.

Baselight does not include any tools for image restoration, which is a shame because even a simple paint tool would have been a very useful addition to the well-rounded toolset. It does ship with a number of effects plugins however, which cover noise reduction, text generation, blurring, and matte tools. Each image can be resized, repositioned and rescaled, meaning it’s possible to take a graded project and pan & scan it.

Overall, the product has everything you’d expect from a software-based DI system, and the performance is unparalleled, especially with the Baselight Eight. Baselight can be used as a standalone system, or as part of a larger pipeline, with separately licensed machines to handled the different tasks of grading (which requires a high degree of performance), conforming (which requires much less performance) and output. Digital output is achieved by rendering, is as fast as the system it runs on (several hours on slow systems, but it can happen faster than realtime on very fast systems, particularly when the rendering is distributed across a render farm), while HD output requires a reasonably powerful system, such as Baselight Four, to work comfortably.

More information on Baselight can be found at Filmlight’s website

The reviwer’s opinions are his own, and not affiliated with any third-party.