A great roundup and musings from Scott Simmons.

"But the creative hot topics this year were the focus/refinement in content security from beginning to end and the streamlining, improvement and budget improvements that have been made in cloud workflow. It’s more than just a moral issue when it comes to movie/show piracy."

(video) A collectibles designer shares some great thoughts on allowing fans to decide between buying the production color-accurate collectibles or the screen color-accurate collectibles. Definitely a craftsman.

This item and comment comes from a friend of the Newsletter: "Cameron indicates that there’s going to be “many dozens” of different versions of Avatar 2 because of all the different aspect ratios, 3D/flat, Imax/regular, Dolby Vision/P3 required for delivery. According to legend, back in 2009 Modern Videofilm (now extinct) reportedly created more than 32 different theatrical versions of the original Avatar for Fox, and that was considered extremely unusual back then." (via Marc Wielege)

(video) Join a roundtable discussion that includes your Newlsetter publisher and three other colorists (Joey D'Anna, Dan Moran, and Robbie Carman) on our experiences color grading HDR and delivering Dolby Vision - with the team from Dolby.

A good overview of what Frame.io presented at NAB 2022.

(video) "Cullen Kelly shares what you really need to know about LUTs, busting the myths that have become widespread along the way."

(video) Bernd Klimm does his usual excellent job covering, "Depth Map for Z Channel in Fusion - Duplicate 2D with Gain and Blur - new Merge Operators - Custom Polygon Modifier."

(video) Like the headline says.

Oliver Peters wasn't happy with his most recent experience using Resolve: "Blackmagic has been on this path for a rather long time now and seem to be at a fork in the road. Maybe they should step back, start from a clean slate, and develop a fresh, streamlined version of Resolve. Or, split it up into a set of individual, focused applications."

Oliver has some good points in the article but I'm not a fan of his solution.

Colorist Cullen Kelly: "In part 3 of our pro DaVinci Wide Gamut workflow series, we're diving into using power windows for shaping light, scaling back adjustments, refining your project's palette and more..."

"Copy That streamlines the ingest process with lighting fast, verified copies of your files from RED, Blackmagic, ARRI cameras, and other storage media. Copy That for Mac handles everything from checksum copies to simultaneous transfers to multiple storage solutions."

If you're not familiar with Colorfront, this is a good introduction.

(video) From Avid's channel: "The latest release of Avid Media Composer includes UI enhancements with the Command Palette Quick Find feature and Reverse Match Frame from the timeline context menu, continued improvements with the dashboard, alignments tools, and performance with Avid Titler +, added functionality with NDI output and the addition of SRT, or Secure Reliable Transport, to stream the output of Media Composer ... to anyone with an SRT enables device or app and more."

(video) A discussion that includes Dolby's Aby Mathew, Robbie Carman, and .

"What is ACES colour management and how does it work? Is it better than Resolve Color Management (RCM)? Should you even use ACES? We’ll answer all of these questions and more in this short guide to understanding ACES in Post Production."

"Flanders Scientific told us that it will have a Zero Delay mode, direct integration with Pomfort Livegrade, and Assimilate Live Looks, a feature set that includes AutoCal and ScopeStream, Tetrahedral Interpolation, and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio."

An impressive set of results: "Now let’s take a look at what happened when I repeated this test for the Mac Studio and plotted results on the same chart ... Before it went off the chart, the Mac Studio’s 6-core performance caught up to the full 28-core performance of the Mac Pro and then surpassed it." Click through for the graphs and interpretation. (via Glenn Rempe)

"Previously HDR film had to be scanned at a slower rate of 10 frames per second. Now the film can be scanned at 30 frames per second. That’s up to 3 times faster than before."

Interesting: "To start off, lets look at the percent of our systems in the last six months built using various CPU product lines from Intel and AMD."

(video) "We go hands-on with the new Looking Glass 4K and 8K holographic displays and catch up with Looking Glass co-founder Shawn Frayne to talk about what the company has been working on since shipping their desktop Portrait device."

Every few years I need to switch my mouse hand to keep from getting a repetitive stress injury. It's about time to make that switch again and this mouse is a prime candidate.

(video) Quite impressive.

(video) From the YouTube account of EllenPlaysBass. Yes. She does. And it's definitely fun.

Another one from EllenPlaysBass. I just couldn't decide which of these to post - so I selected them both!