You would be surprised. When my brother was a movie theater manager he got invites to a lot of pre-screenings of movies. I was able to go with him a few times and I'll never forget seeing my first movie print before it went through color correction and ADR/sound balancing. Without those steps (and I'm sure others I'm not aware of) the movie experience was very jarring (and somewhat funny).
Your comment is dismissing the entire field of color correction. That is not just a thing for this project, it is a part of literally every movie and TV show you watch and has been since the inception of colour film.
I got into color grading still photos last summer. In my case it is not "correction" to the truth but rather making a set of images conform to a brand image. (I had a day when I went out to a beauty spot and packed the wrong lens, I made up a story about another photographer who had a camera from an alternate timeline and developed a method to take distinctive pictures with a cheap lens)
Funny the only kind of picture that I don't color grade are sports photos because I don't want to mess up the color of the jerseys, though if I was careful in how I did it, it would be OK.
I have been struggling to develop a reliable process for making red-cyan anaglyphs and one step of the process would be a color grade that moves colors away from reds and cyans that would all be in one eye or the other eye. I've got to figure out how to make my own LUT cubes to do it.
Are they dismissing it, or are they just ignorant (which is totally OK) and need to be shown the way? They've literally asked if it's "really important", perhaps we could answer that question?
In all fairness, I edited my comment, I did say "I don't think it's important", but it was indeed due to ignorance, as well as ask if it really is important.
It could be the case, yes. My friend studied and works in optics (physics & CS) but we have not talked about it, not even sure color correction is something related to optics but could be. Perhaps the time to ask has come now. :P
Usually color correction happens in post-production, where optics are developed pre-production. Definitely, poorly designed lenses will have color casting and fringing issues, but color correction is largely about balancing colors across various lighting conditions / sources. (Think Daylight vs. Warm bulbs. Now think about how many lights are in a football stadium.)
It's about more than color correction. The software they have lets people in the control room set all the parameters on the cameras, so instead of having a camera operator do it behind the camera they do it from the control room, which might even be on another continent.
With all the switching between camera angles during a sports broadcast, the difference in white balance, brightness and color grading would be really distracting and annoying.
Perhaps it’s so important that you take it for granted, even though it took a great deal of effort from others to make sure you don’t notice the problem in the first place.
It if wasn't that important no one would buy it. Doesn't matter how good your sales people are, if the product doesn't solve a real problem, it's very unlikely you will sell it in a sustainable way.
> if the product doesn't solve a real problem, it's very unlikely you will sell it in a sustainable way.
I do not believe this. If you look around, there are many non-issues being sold as real problems[1], and people buy it. People buy all sorts of crap, that is just consumerism in effect. If you did sales, you probably know this. Same thing with "bullshit jobs". Perhaps "sustainable" is the keyword here, but I am not so sure about that either.
[1] Snake-oils comes to mind. Pretty flourishing business.
On the whole though, B2B sales (as this would be) are generally much more rational than consumer emotive/fantasy-driven marketing and sales. Its not like perfume sales. There are usually several people who hold each other to account and need rational justification for things, products need to demonstrate their value and meet several metrics that are reasonably objective. Not that emotion/status/gut holds no part, but that it biases the decisions to a much lower degree in B2B.
This is sorta beside the point about color-grading, but I don't entirely agree about a product needing to solve a real problem.
I worked a startup that had decent tech, but a shit product. Wasn't focused enough to really solve clients' issues. Maybe alleviated some issues, but also introduced more. It was disliked by the people who actually had to use it. But our sales guy was really good at convincing those peoples' bosses that it would make the company more money.
It was a total top-down sales approach. Throw a bunch of buzzwords at the founder/CFO/boss, they force it on the people actually doing the work. I hated it, and it worked so well that fixing the product was never a priority. It was always new "features" to slap on more buzzwords to the sales pitch. I really think it could've been a good product, too!
We're still a rather small team of mainly tech people, we don't have a single sales person in the traditional way (not yet). Ghislain was able to develop an architecture that we could count on as being reliable while being able to quickly experiment in all directions and build on top of what was started. We were never really afraid of major failures as the system has been proven to be robust after the first 2 years (everything was started from scratch, including hardware).
As we were able to very quickly respond to customer demands for anything special that they would need, they ended-up being our main sales channel by recommending the solution further. And nearly 10 years after, we're still pretty much on the same model, trying to keep up with the developments, delivering products and supporting our customers. The website is outdated and it's been years we're trying to make any progress there, eventually we'll succeed at that.
Congrats on an incredibly impressive and technically complex product.
Operating such high visibility events like the Olympics sounds pretty nerve-wracking. How much of an issue is security for you? Do you experience any attacks?
Security has been a hot topic for the past few years, but it's getting even more attention now. Fortunately, it’s mostly a concern for production facilities, and the most effective solution is often complete isolation—most production networks don’t have internet access at all.
With the rise of remote production (where the control room is located at headquarters while cameras and microphones are on-site at stadiums), broadcasters are implementing VPNs, private fiber connections, and other methods to stay largely separate from the public internet.
In our case, the only part that uses the public internet is the relay server, which is necessary when working over cellular networks. Security is one of the main reasons we haven’t expanded this service into a full cloud portal yet—it’s much easier to secure a lightweight data relay with no database, running on a single port, than to lock down a larger, more complex system.
I want to add that the relay server is never handling any customer secrets (so a low value target), and we have techniques in place to reduce the probability of DoS (increase the cost to the attacker).
So even if someone would be able to break into the server through the small attack surface, he would not be able to change any setting on any of our customer's devices. Or even read any status either. Of course, if someone can break into our server, the DoS is inevitable, but so far this never happened.
The article doesn't go in detail about how they solve that. But that's the key problem they highlight as being solved. It's a product which manages multiple cameras for events, and color correction is one of those "obvious in hindsight" problems to be solved.
Managing multiple cameras is definitely something I would consider important, but keep in mind I am not knowledgeable at all about the entertainment industry.
I interpreted that Cyanview controls color settings in cameras, but video doesn’t run through their product. I wonder if an AI model could efficiently balance colors after the video mixer, especially if the incoming feed was in 10-bit color depth and the outgoing feed 8-bit.
It if wasn't that important no one would buy it. Doesn't matter how good your sales people are if the product doesn't solve a real problem, it's very unlikely you will sell it in a sustainable way.
Upvoting this because I don't think it's fair to downvote someone for trying to understand why something might be more important than they otherwise would've thought.
