ASSIMILATE has released SCRATCH Lab – a new digital lab tool for on-location workflows and VFX dailies pipelines. Released simultaneously on Mac OS X and Windows 7, SCRATCH Lab is a comprehensive end-to-end digital system for the review, versioning, color correction, conform and deliverables of dailies created during production, or the VFX process. SCRATCH Lab’s flexible design and intuitive and customizable user interface allow it to be easily deployed across a broad range of tasks for 2D and 3D stereo projects, up to 5K resolution.
SCRATCH Lab is paired with SCRATCH Six, which was also released on Mac and Windows. SCRATCH Six is ASSIMILATE’s high-performance, digital cinema and broadcast finishing tool for RED and other high-end digital workflows.
When used on-location for a digital shoot, SCRATCH Lab replaces the photochemical lab. Its speed and real-time capabilities deliver time savings for DITs, data wranglers, colorists, VFX teams, DPs, directors and producers. SCRATCH Lab can organize digital negatives by day, unit, camera, scene, shot or take, and allows an unlimited number of versions in a single view, without import or rendering. It supports all popular RAW camera formats, and carries scene, take, audio and 3D stereo convergence metadata through the entire project.
To aid clear communication between the set and other departments, SCRATCH Lab also offers creative review and comments tools, such as remote review via HTML, and Sticky Notes that allow comments from any reviewer to be viewed throughout the project.
In VFX dailies pipelines, SCRATCH Lab is optimized for DPX, OpenEXR, RAW, and other popular review/deliverable formats, and can playback resolutions of up to 5K in real time. This enables users to load and playback media in any combination of format, resolution and color space on the same view. Furthermore, SCRATCH Lab can be easily automated to perform difficult or repetitive tasks, such as selecting aspect ratios or correcting frame offsets.
“For on-set dailies work, SCRATCH Lab packages all the tools I need to support all camera formats into one product,” said Jody Neckles, feature film and commercial DIT. “It has powerful real-time review capabilities, and can generate dailies in all the different formats required by a production – for editorial, iPads and the web. Crucially, with its advanced color management tools, I can apply LUTs non-destructively to the digital files, and manage different looks through the duration of a shoot. In short, it’s great!”
“The best thing about SCRATCH Lab is that it can playback, in real-time, any media that you throw at it – all in the same view – such as RED RAW, ARRIRAW, DPX, EXR files, QTs and JPEGs,” said Danielle Costa, production manager for VFX at Marvel Entertainment. “Plus, it’s straightforward to integrate with an existing database, so it flawlessly managed the thousands of 2D and 3D stereo shots and versions during postproduction on Thor (Marvel Entertainment/Paramount Pictures). SCRATCH Lab solves a big challenge in motion picture review playback by bringing different media together at your fingertips, and instantly showing them in the best possible quality.”
