Apical Imaging’s Real-time Colour Corrector

As much as I don’t like push-button colour-correction boxes as a rule, I’ve also seen enough live television to understand the need for them. Live broadcasts tend to have little (if any) thought to colour given to them beyond the parameters the camera operator set when she first switched the camera on. The problem with real-time colour-correctors is that they tend to correct the overall brightness and contrast of an image, without any consideration for the dynamic range. The result of this is that scenes with strong backlighting can look dark, or that highlights and shadows can look muddy.

Apical’s box, the D-Rex LCP-100, is different in this regard. Developed in conjunction with Fuji TV and Storenet, the unit uses their Iridix image processor to separate a live HDSDI stream into shadows, highlights and midtones, and correct them independently, with some noise reduction thrown in for good measure. I had the opportunity to see a demo of the box in action, and the results were very promising, even with a minimal amount of user configuration.

It doesn’t appear to be on sale yet, but the technology has been available on a number of devices for a while, from Sony’s Alpha series SLRs to The Foundry’s Furnace plugins.

Posted: February 29th, 2008
Categories: Tools
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