Color Imaging Conference

The Color Imaging Conference (CIC) 32th edition is now officially over. It took place in Montreal, it was following last year edition in Paris and it was my 14th attendance of CIC.

Conferences are like vortex, even if they happen at home, in your time zone, after 24h you adjust to the people traveling to the event from all over the world almost, and you experience jet lag without traveling.

This time was less stressful because my role was lower comparing to last year, from General Chair to Past General Chair and Local Arrangements. I’m lying because it was a bit stressful, as a workshop organizer on Tuesday there was the question “will people attend the workshop? And will they find it interesting???”

Workshop: color pipeline for VFX and movie industry

Together with two formers colleagues from DNEG we proposed a discussion around color and the VFX and movie production pipeline. The goal was for me to quickly presents my role as color scientist within a VFX studio and let Christian Ganea (senior colorist) and Lee Sullivan (VFX supervisor) to talk about their work in relationship to color.

The three of us did work on the same shows in the last two years and had several discussions, we thought those discussions about the use of the color pipeline could be interesting for many people. We could observe that depending of your speciality, your task, you have a different take on the project.

I will typically rely on the client spec to setup the color management internally for our artists to be able to do they work, the VFX supervisor will have a global overview of the VFX making, from sketches to their actual production and the colorist will be able to control the look defined by the client, if it is properly setup and to provide sometime additional looks for internal work when information from the client are still missing or the client is asking for advice on the look. For many reason it is importan to be able to reconstruct the client pipeline such that our effects will fit as if they were part of the original footages.

The conference and the special HDR session

As usual Wednesday to Friday are for the technical sessions where the authors of the accepted papers will give presentations about their work. It’s the job of the Technical Program Chairs to setup the program based on all the articles.

In addition we had almost half a day session co-organized by Apple and Adobe on HDR imaging, more specifically an HDR pipeline with an evening keynote by Sarah Silver fashion photographer. The notion of gain map was repeated, allowing to extend SDR to HDR, even for images taken a few years back with or without an iPhone. A very good journey from r&d to real use case for the HDR imaging pipeline in photography, not that trivial.

What was not on the conference program

The discussions at the coffee breaks or diners, re-connecting with former colleagues, introducing people to each other. I’m very happy that this year a solid attendance of locals did show up from the movie and VFX industry, so a big shoutout to the National Film Board of Canada and RodeoFX to just name a few.

Next edition in Asia

It was announced that next year edition will be in Hong-Kong, a first asian presence for CIC (it was supposed to be Chiba Japan but COVID passed by that year…) and we all hope that many people can travel there.