Colour Intelligence, a Hollywood-based startup, has unveiled its Colourlab Ai software, a colour grading system that the company says will dramatically improve the process of colour correction thanks to Artificial Intelligence. Founded by colour scientist Dado Valentic and industry veterans Mark L. Pederson and Steve Bayes, Colour Intelligence has established itself as a high-end image processing consultancy. It has been working with Warner Brothers, HBO, Netflix, NBC Universal, and CBS on advanced HDR colour pipelines and providing specialised colour grading plug-ins for look design and creation.
After more than three years in development, Colour Intelligence is now offering access to its groundbreaking AI technology for the first time. Limited to the first 500 applicants, the Colourlab Ai Factory Driver program will provide early adopter access to the software, giving an exclusive pool of industry professionals beta team status. The company will provide immediate access to Colourlab Ai while in development, letting early adopters test, contribute feedback and request features for the colour grading application before the public release in early October.
Using advanced AI models trained for cinematic content, Colourlab Ai makes it simple to automatically colour match footage from a graded clip or reference image. Instantly matching scenes across an edited timeline or matching hours of dailies, the time-savings Colourlab Ai offers is revolutionary. By leveraging AI to eliminate the manual and tedious aspects of the colour grading process, Colourlab Ai empowers filmmakers and colourists to focus more on the creative part of their job.
“When you have masses of material to colour match, it can consume all your time and energy, so that when it comes to the craft grade, you’re already maxed out,” Valentic explains. “Colourlab Ai analyses the composition of the shot to describe the colour characteristics of footage – whether it’s a close-up shot, an exterior shot, daylight or nighttime, etc. The AI ‘understands’ how humans see, and it uses human perceptual transforms that are vastly more accurate than standard algorithmic methods.”
Rather than rendering colour into a timeline, Colourlab Ai presents the AI-generated adjustments in the form of non-destructive metadata settings, as the industry standard familiar controls of ASC CDLs, Lift Gamma Gain or even Printer Lights. This approach allows colourists, cinematographers, and content creators to continue making subjective and creative adjustments throughout the post production process.
“Achieving a high-end result in colour grading is extremely challenging for many content creators as they lack the resources of Hollywood productions and access to the most talented colourists in the industry. Colourlab Ai flips the grading process on its head by essentially removing the manual part which requires extreme skill and technical expertise, and puts the focus purely on the creative,” commented Mark L. Pederson, COO of Colour Intelligence.
Steve Bayes, former Avid designer and Apple Pro Video Product Manager responsible for Avid Symphony, Final Cut Pro, and FCP X, provided angel investment for the development of Colourlab Ai and came aboard as a company advisor earlier this year.
“This software has the potential to save filmmakers hours or even days of work, with a Metal accelerated single step to process and colour match 24 hours of dailies in less than 15 minutes,” said Bayes. “We can deliver consistent, high-quality results across all shots. No preset is ever going to be able to do that – and that is the genius of Colourlab Ai.”
In its early stages, Google and Nvidia supported Colour Intelligence’s artificial intelligence R&D efforts. The company was also selected by the renowned Silicon Valley incubator program, Y Combinator startup school, designed to bring funding and expertise to promising new products and enterprises.
Visit www.colourlab.ai