(13 September 2007 3:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Autodesk Inc. has unveiled the Autodesk Lustre 2008 digital color grading system. The latest edition was showcased at the Autodesk stand during the International Broadcasters Convention 2007 held at Amsterdam from 7-11 September.

Lustre has shaped colors and lighting in feature films, trailers and TV shows, including Balls of Fury, El Cantante, Children of Men, Babel, King Kong, Cane, Pushing Daisies and Swingtown.

"Around the world, Autodesk Lustre is used to enhance lighting, cinematography and storytelling in films and TV content,” said Autodesk Media & Entertainment VP of advanced systems Stig Gruman.

"Lustre 2008 equips colorists with even more creative flexibility and includes a new multi-layer timeline. Colorists can experiment with look creation earlier in the post-production process. As well, Lustre 2008 offers a better workflow that leads to faster project completion and ultimately offers greater value for all types of productions," he said.

Lustre's advanced creative capabilities, as well as cost-effective performance is made possible through Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-acceleration, pipeline flexibility and facility-wide application interoperability.

Denmark's Sonne Postproduction managing director Andreas Rostock said, "At Sonne, we're ready to take on any kind of project, from feature films to music videos, but we specialize in commercials. We've developed a workflow that gives us the flexibility needed to take on any type of job and Autodesk Lustre fits well into our process. The new multi-layer timeline in Lustre 2008 will give us greater workflow flexibility in terms of how we conform, while the rich grading toolset will allow us to expand our creative capabilities to deliver a higher-quality product to our customers."

The new multi-layer timeline gives colorists gestural tools to quickly create editorial, shot and grade versions of their project. Colorists can experiment with multiple looks on a single shot, as well as easily applying a look across multiple shots.

With the automatic region tracker, colorists can track elements of a scene faster than ever before. Colorists can specify an image region and Lustre automatically analyzes inside the region in order to apply scaling and rotation to secondary geometries.

Lustre 2008 is likely to be available in autumn 2007 for the Microsoft Windows operating system.