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Open Source Color Management Is Broken

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Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#81

Post by ancientworldnow »

anfractuosity wrote: post #70
ancientworldnow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a colorist. Many of us do use windows, many use OSX, many more use Linux. Every major color critical application supports many types of LUTs and color management. Further, HP Dreamcolors have tons of problems and aren't considered solid for color critical work (but are fine for semi color accurate stuff like intermediate comps etc). Color accurate work is done over SDI with dedicated LUT boxes handling the color…

That's interesting regarding OLED, I thought over time the different colour LEDs decay at different rates? A while ago I had a look at Eizo's 10 bit / channel TFTs, which looked impressive to me (from a layman's perspective), do you have any opinions of those?

Eizo's high end displays are great for almost all uses up to the highest end color critical installs. I recommend them over the DreamColors all the time. You can't get much better without moving to ultra high end pro solutions.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#82

Post by anfractuosity »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #81
anfractuosity wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting regarding OLED, I thought over time the different colour LEDs decay at different rates? A while ago I had a look at Eizo's 10 bit / channel TFTs, which looked impressive to me (from a layman's perspective), do you have any opinions of those?

Eizo's high end displays are great for almost all uses up to the highest end color critical installs. I recommend them over the DreamColors all the time. You can't get much better without moving to ultra high end pro solutions.

Awesome, thanks for the heads up :) Just for curiosity what manufacturers make the very best monitors in your eyes for colour work?

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#83

Post by ancientworldnow »

pzone wrote: post #50
coldtea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every large visual effects studio runs on linux, with hundreds of linux workstations at each one. Color sensitive work like lighting and compositing has been done for well over a decade on linux. That's for rendering, where the OS and Desktop experience doesn't really matter, and the cheaper it is the better. Few pros do the actual editing and color work (where the decisions are made, not the rendering part) on Lin…

That's not right - Linux is used on desktop workstations as well. Check out the discussion in this recent thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7zms77/gnome_2_spott...

So this is about DaVinci Resolve since it has the most flexibility for setup, many other systems are borderline turnkey.

The recommended setup is a super micro chassis with dual xeons (12 core cpus min rec, 20 core preferred), min 32GB ram (usually at least 64,128+ common on high end systems), SSD for OS, thunderbolt (min)/pciE/10GbE/fibre (preferred) attached storage usually 8 bay raid6 or similar min, almost always NVIDIA GPUs with 8x 1080ti's or the latest Titans being the most common set up I see.

This runs on CentOS or RHEL 6.8 or 7.3.

Video signal is output over SDI from a PCIe to a LUT box (for color transforms) then to a color critical display (FSi, Sony, or Dolby typically with the best suites using cinema projectors). A second SDI runs out to a box showing video scopes. Everything is usually calibrated by light Illusions software and using a Minolta colorimeter probe (typically a 3rd party service does this every few months).

The GUI monitor(s) are usually just regular consumer whatever.

The software is controlled by a large, $30K control panel that looks similar to an airplane cockpit.

That's most of the important stuff, but I can fill in details where you're curious.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#84

Post by dtf »

foepys wrote: post #80
danceparty wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree, the entire visual effects industry, including their color departments, run on linux. Baselight and Resolve, are the two most common color correction programs in the industry, baselight exclusively runs on linux, and the big color companies (company 3, efilm, technicolor) all run resolve on linux. Coloring is done either on projectors, or broadcast monitors (something like a sony PVMA250 on the low end…

Do you by any chance have some links where I can read more about Linux as a front-end system in the film/graphics industry? This is field of work in which I would never have guessed Linux to be strong.

It’s mainly in large facilities that run huge jobs with massive amounts of data. Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Flame, Baselight, many in-house VFX software all run perfectly well Linux. And of course the cornucopia of renderers running on their server farms, as might be more expected.

The lineage is from SGI, where many of these applications were born, but as the company faltered and consumer graphics hardware took off thanks to gaming, Linux became the natural home.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#85

Post by dm319 »

softwarelimits wrote: post #77
ancientworldnow wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just not true, you're spreading misinformation. I am a colorist, I'm the person making these final decisions. Every single high end color suite I've ever been in runs Linux. In fact, the full version of Baselight (one of the defacto color correction suites) only runs on Linux. DaVinci Resolve (one of the other major ones) ran only on Linux for the majority of it's existence and the full panel version (the pro…

I am really very interested in reading about a typical hardware and software setup for a Linux colorist workstation with a special focus on which graphics card and which drivers to use! Nvidia?

you might want to see the post further down with the technical details (possibly ended up in the wrong place)

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#86

Post by ancientworldnow »

anfractuosity wrote: post #82
ancientworldnow wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eizo's high end displays are great for almost all uses up to the highest end color critical installs. I recommend them over the DreamColors all the time. You can't get much better without moving to ultra high end pro solutions.

Awesome, thanks for the heads up :) Just for curiosity what manufacturers make the very best monitors in your eyes for colour work?

Flanders Scientific, Sony, Dolby in order from cheapest to most expensive. FSi and Sony use the same panels for their 25" models. Sony x300 is the go to right now for affordable HDR. Dolby is the gold standard for non projector color critical work.

For non color critical necessary displays, Eizo is about the best. Lots of" good enough" panels from LG, Acer, and Fell though. I actually have a gaming panel that calibrated surprisingly well and holds those numbers.

The best consumer display by far though are the LG OLED televisions. They're so good that we're installing them in lots of mid level suites as client monitors (aka close enough to our color critical panels).

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#87

Post by ancientworldnow »

softwarelimits wrote: post #77
ancientworldnow wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just not true, you're spreading misinformation. I am a colorist, I'm the person making these final decisions. Every single high end color suite I've ever been in runs Linux. In fact, the full version of Baselight (one of the defacto color correction suites) only runs on Linux. DaVinci Resolve (one of the other major ones) ran only on Linux for the majority of it's existence and the full panel version (the pro…

I am really very interested in reading about a typical hardware and software setup for a Linux colorist workstation with a special focus on which graphics card and which drivers to use! Nvidia?

So this is about DaVinci Resolve since it has the most flexibility for setup, many other systems are borderline turnkey.

The recommended setup is a super micro chassis with dual xeons (12 core cpus min rec, 20 core preferred), min 32GB ram (usually at least 64,128+ common on high end systems), SSD for OS, thunderbolt (min)/pciE/10GbE/fibre (preferred) attached storage usually 8 bay raid6 or similar min, almost always NVIDIA GPUs with 8x 1080ti's or the latest Titans being the most common set up I see.

This runs on CentOS or RHEL 6.8 or 7.3.

Video signal is output over SDI from a PCIe to a LUT box (for color transforms) then to a color critical display (FSi, Sony, or Dolby typically with the best suites using cinema projectors). A second SDI runs out to a box showing video scopes. Everything is usually calibrated by light Illusions software and using a Minolta colorimeter probe (typically a 3rd party service does this every few months).

The GUI monitor(s) are usually just regular consumer whatever.

The software is controlled by a large, $30K control panel that looks similar to an airplane cockpit.

That's most of the important stuff, but I can fill in details where you're curious.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#88

Post by braderhart »

newnewpdro wrote: post #79

It's unclear to me why there's no color palette/correction table exposed in libdrm/KMS at the kernel. It should just be part of the video mode, maybe with a bit to indicate when the driver/hardware doesn't support changing it. But always be able to read it out, make it linear nonsense when the support isn't there - that won't be worse than what we have now. Then the layers up the stack like Wayland/X/GNOME/KDE are ju…

Have you created it, cause if not then that might explain why what you want in detail doesn't exist.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#89

Post by ancientworldnow »

dm319 wrote: post #85
softwarelimits wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really very interested in reading about a typical hardware and software setup for a Linux colorist workstation with a special focus on which graphics card and which drivers to use! Nvidia?

you might want to see the post further down with the technical details (possibly ended up in the wrong place)

Yeah that's exactly what happened. Mobile client glitched, but it's in both places now.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#90

Post by borplk »

cratermoon wrote: post #9

The Linux community will attempt to solve the problem by attempting to create an entirely new color management system, which will get at best 80% done with a handful of outstanding Hard bugs, at least one of which will be bad enough to break the entire thing except on one specific distro/gui/hardware combination.

It will just be a sub-component of systemd. Named colord.
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