[Tyson Birmann]

The Specs on the AVID website mention CDL support quite a few times. I am excited to know what this means. As a “near set” Dailies tech, I’m curious to see how this will be implemented in the workflow as this version becomes more prolific and editors get comfortable with it.
Though, the idea does have it’s flaws with current workflows and without some changes to the way we work on set, this CDL support will be less useful than they might think.

The main problem I see is that CDL information is only useful in the editor if it is part of the METADATA of the file. In order to add CDL information into the METADATA the clip needs to have color correction applied. If it has color correction applied, there won’t be a “clean” version of the footage for AVID to apply it’s the correction to. I am afraid that this will result in a lot of footage being viewed with a “double LUT”.

If this is going to be useful, Dailies software(s) are going to have to figure out a way to apply CDL info to a clip without actually applying it to the footage itself. Frankly, we wouldn’t even need to transcode the footage at all… simply re-write the Metadata fields and let AVID and AMA do the rest. It would be great if this could be true of Audio as well. Simply do all of the sync / and color work and then export an ALE that would contain all of the information that AMA would need to import the work.

This would provide the best of all worlds:
DPs would get the color they want translated to post.
Post could “tweak” this color when it is needed to match like shots.
Production can save on Drives and transport of drives.
The DI will have better starting information and also include work done in the AVID rather than CDL’s that haven’t been touched since the shoot day.

What isn’t clear from the AVID site and info is whether it is applying this LUT / CDL info over the clip or creating new transcodes of the clips with this new color. Essentially, is it doing it’s own dailies or just adding a color layer on the LOG/RAW footage?

Anyway, my thoughts and comments. Curious what you all think.
Tyson