FirstLight mini-review
 

I'm working on a project now where we did a 3 camera shoot of a high school musical. Other than myself and a camera operator, the crew are all kids. The lighting was horrible! They had a couple of spots that were way too hot (which they loved to use) and when they did use gels they seemed to really like yellow. Each camera got a different angle on this lighting and the footage was way out of balance.

Also, as the show progressed they went from very hot lights (my XH-A1 kept kicking in ND filters!) to scenes so dim my single sensor camera had a really hard time.

So here's where FirstLight is already helping me. I took all of the footage and converted it with HDLink and put it into FirstLight. I was then able to adjust each camera to get the look to be the same. I was also able to tone down the harsh spots and adjust the white balance to kill off some of the yellow.

At the same time I brought up some of the dim shots and got back material I thought was useless. FirstLight seems to be really good at handling both bright and dim shots with the same settings, so I won't need to make a lot of scene-specific adjustments.

Before trying ProspectHD, I had already started a Premiere Pro CS4 project and done multi-camera edits and color correction. I created a copy of this file and replaced the sources with the CineForm files. I deleted all of the existing color correction to see the FirstLight effects unaltered. Already it looks great!

Next I'm going to make a few scene-specific color adjustments with CineForm's PPro effects. I don't expect to have as many of these as I would have without FirstLight. Finally I'll render the whole thing, and then I may run it back through FirstLight for final color before going to DVD.

Aside from the stability issues (Import Process Server errors) and the lack of the playback engine, I'm impressed with ProspectHD v4 and FirstLight.

Regards,
Glenn

Glenn, that's great news. Those are exactly the kinds of problems First Light and our active metadata were designed to solve!

Hey Tim,
Tried first light and it is wonderful.
Will current Cineform 4k licence holders have to upgrade from version 3 to 4 - money wise I mean? Also how will activation happen when the software goes out of beta?Good luck guys and thanks for the mini review Glenn

Henry, you can send always make a financial contribution to CineForm - the money will go to excellent use - I assure you!

Otherwise all Prospect 4K v3 users get a free upgrade to Prospect 4K v4 - including First Light. When we're "official" with the v4 release we'll post a link to use to request a new serial number.

You just made my 4K day with those words!

Now, we just wait with baited breath to see the cost of the 4.0 CFHD upgrade for our other machines...so we can make our contributions, of course!

Awesome news David