Archive for November, 2015

On many shows we are increasingly shooting RAW and/or in a multitude of compressed formats with different cameras utilizing different flavors of log.  ARRI Alexa, Canon C300, Sony FS7, Panasonic VariCam, GoPro, Blackmagic, DSLRs – just keeping all the color spaces and log profiles straight can be a major challenge.

The Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) has simplified things for folks at the high end of the food chain. But for the rest of us toiling in typical broadcast productions and independent features, the convoluted post-camera wrangling of color and LUTs has become an unwelcome hassle with the wholesale wrangling of .cube, .aml, and .ctl files.

Thankfully we now have Latice, a powerful and versatile LUT management tool that greatly minimizes this ongoing hassle. To be clear it is not intended to compete with or replace grading applications like Davinci Resolve.  Think of it more as a LUT Swiss Army Knife, able to view, transcode, and conform, a wide array of color spaces and profiles.

So if you’re shooting B-roll on a Canon C300 Mark II and we need to conform to the A camera which is a Sony FS7, Lattice can convert the Canon Log2 files to Sony S-Log, which we then import into Resolve for simple and straightforward color grading in a single consistent color space.

The Mac-based app features a very straightforward interface, which offers plenty of hooks for tweaking.  As cameras like the Panasonic VariCam 35 are enabling the creation of 3D LUTs in camera it becomes a simple matter in Lattice to convert Panasonic’s V-Log file to something else, like Sony S-Log or Blackmagic’s Film Emulation (BMD) LUT.

Lattice doesn’t eliminate entirely the complexity and hassle of wrangling LUTs post-camerabut it sure makes the ordeal a whole lot easier.

I use it regularly and recommend it.

Lattice is a very simple LUT management tool. If you shoot with multiple cameras and employ various color spaces Lattice will conform the different LUT flavors to a single format for grading inside Davinci Resolve (or other color correction environment).