Avid and FilmLight to add native Baselight color to Media Composer

Avid and FilmLight are bringing Baselight-powered color natively into Media Composer, deepening a partnership that dates back to 2012 for a more connected edit-to-grade pipeline.

Color seems to be a new frontier in NLEs as grading becomes steadily folded into editing workflows. Avid and FilmLight announced a strategic partnership at IBC to bring a new Baselight-powered color experience natively into Avid Media Composer, for a more connected color pipeline.

This is a long way from being the companies’ first collaboration. Baselight for Avid has been available as a plug-in since 2012, but it is a significant deepening of the integration between the two separate platforms and looks to create what it describes as “a more continuous workflow where the edit can better reflect the intended look of the finished project.”

Developmental focus

Avid and FilmLight are focusing on four key areas:

Native color inside Media Composer: Bringing Baselight-powered color capabilities deeper into the Media Composer experience, so color feels like part of the edit rather than a step bolted on at the end.

A connected path from dailies to delivery: Keeping color decisions open and connected throughout production, helping teams move more fluidly between editorial, review, grading and finishing.

Specialist color science at editorial scale: Extending FilmLight's color technology to a broader community of Media Composer users, while preserving the depth, precision and control required by professional colorists and finishing teams inside the traditional Baselight environment.

Expanded online and delivery capabilities: Scaling with the needs of each production, from being able to complete delivery entirely within Media Composer to a renderless roundtrip with full Baselight for teams working at the highest levels of finishing and delivery.

Building on the Baselight Editions workflow available today, essentially, it will create a new workflow that can scale from editorial color through online and delivery, including renderless roundtrip with full Baselight for the highest-end finishing needs (no one is pretending that the high-end is going to disappear at any time soon).