Welcome to the Color Timer podcast. I am your host, Vincent Taylor. This is the podcast where we speak to professionals who work with color. Today, I am speaking to Mr. Steve Shaw. He is CEO of a company called Light Illusion, although you'll see he gets a bit shy when I call him CEO. He's a fascinating fellow and he deals, and how do I water this down into a couple of little bite-sized sentances?
But basically, very, very basically, they deal with color management, color calibration, that whole world of making sure that you trust what you're looking at. But it's a great conversation, so let's go. Take your seats because the hourglass is about to turn. We are entering the world of the micro podcast. Explore the craft, creativity, and science of professionals who use color to tell stories. Welcome to The Color Timer with Vincent Taylor. [MUSIC] Steve, hi, thank you for joining me.
Pleasure, mate, pleasure. Yeah, good to see you. I stumbled onto your work because I keep seeing posts on LinkedIn and instantly intrigued by what you're working on and so then became a little bit quietly obsessed. You're classified as a specialist in critical color management. Well, when I started to do some research, you come from a heck of a background, like you've worn a lot of hats. And I'd love to go through some stepping stones as to how you got to where you are now.
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't classify myself as being the specialist in color stuff. I've ended up doing color and I happen to have guys that work with us that are very much specialists in color. Cuz that's kind of where we've ended up. But that was certainly not where things started out. I've been in the film and TV industry for more years than I care t-- yes, there you go, yeah, for the timer. Otherwise, I just waffled on forever. Yeah, no, I'm 59, give or take now.
And I started in this industry when I was 16. Wait, wait, wait. You're 59 years old, you're looking good, mate. You're looking good. Yeah, that's lack of stress. Yeah. I just happened to grow up in a town where at that time, a young and upcoming company was starting out doing the very early days of digital TV, which was Quantel. And I ended up basically getting a job at the age of 16 with them rather than going to college and university, which was the plan.
I mean, at that time, companies actually were quite successful. Keen to get hold of people younger so they could kind of train them in this kind of new concept of digital imaging that really wasn't being taught because it didn't exist in college universities and that. And basically went in as an electronics engineer and ended up doing that kind of side of things for some considerable time.
I ended up in Los Angeles, well, actually New York first, and then L.A. in the very early days of kind of things that were called Harry and Encore and what have you, the Paint Box and that as an engineer doing installations, doing service work, whatever. So got into it very much from the hands on electronic side of things. And from there, it just kind of that was it for quite some years.
And then I decided when we started getting into the kind of greater level of image manipulation, which was in my view was film. So we got into digital film through the development of Domino with Quantel. And that side of it was at that time pretty interesting because it was a whole new game, scanning film, digitizing it, doing the visual effects, putting your class of film and cutting it back into the original negative. And I ended up setting up a facility or a few facilities in Soho.
Many White Coats was the first one doing pretty much that kind of work. - Such a great name for a company. - Yeah, we did a lot of work on films like Elizabeth, Lost in Space, Deep Blue Sea, things like that. And it was those early days, we were physically handling camera, original negative, scanning it, doing the digital effects work, putting it back to film. And it was being spliced in and then the whole chain was still film.
I left there, to be fair, I just got fed up working in dark rooms 24 seven for two years. And I actually joined, yeah, I joined Cinetel as technical director on the telecine side. But it was at the end of that era. And if I'm truthful, I didn't look into what was happening with the company and the whole film industry. I should have known because obviously I was already working with digital cameras at that time.
And I ended up in Rome at Trinity to Film Studios at the beginning of what is now just true digital cinematography and digital post-production in the film side, in the resolutions that we now talk about as 3k, 4k, what have you nowadays. And I was out there on and off for a good 18 months and started travelling again to act as a consultant in the same business but all around the world.
And I ended up again starting another post house called Axis Post in Shepparton Studios with another partner company which was Axis Films and carried on doing that side of it. But at the same time doing this consultancy work and bouncing around all over them and I've worked on and off in pretty much everywhere Africa, Japan, China, Hong Kong, you name it I've probably been there.
That's amazing. And while I was doing that we basically started, well I started developing a very simple, what was effectively a spreadsheet with VBS scripting and that to do color manipulation. And we were using it just back in the days of the Viper camera and we were working on a film, one of the Highlander films which was shot with Viper, another film that was called Silence Becomes You which was the very first film ever shot entirely digital that wasn't video.
It was all captured with what were called S2 disc recorders in pure digital imagery non-video. And I did a lot of work on the color science of that using this kind of VBS script, Excel spreadsheet stuff that I'd been playing with for my own application. And people started to hear about it and then started to ask if they could get their hands onto it. So I ended up selling it for not a lot but just as something to do. And effectively that's grown into what we do
today as Light Illusion. So now you are the CEO of Light Illusion and I had... Wow, come on. I love titles, actually I don't. And I had a look at the website and the home page is filled with graphs and numbers and it's like it looks awesome. And it's such a great kind of overview of what you guys do in just one picture, with Light Illusion and what you guys are doing at a very base level. Who is it for? I mean, it's not for the people necessary that we intended it.
I mean, originally it was always... We were in the professional world. I mean, everybody that works with us. And I mean, Light Illusion is just a front company. There are no real employees other than myself and my wife who is the company secretary, just for legal purposes, the two of us. And the people we work with are effectively freelance associates, consultants, whatever you want to call them. But we've been working together for many years on different aspects
of the product. And it goes back to people that you may recognize. I mean, Walter Valpatto, who's a well-known colorist in LA. Well, when I was working in Cinicito in Rome, he was actually the engineer for Quantel at the time. He was their support engineer. And because I was at Cinicito with a guy called David Bush, who was well-known for using Quantel kit over the years, Quantel sent us the early days of the IQ system when they didn't understand what they
were going to do with it. So Walter would come in and babysit this hardware that just turned up, that we were playing with. And we ended up consulting with Quantel to develop the color side of IQ and turn it into the system it became. So I ended up doing a lot of freelance consultancy work back with Quantel at that time. And Walter was very much involved with us because he was there in Rome. So he would come into Cinicito because he hadn't anything else to do.
And one of the very early IQ installations for color work was at Fotokem in LA. And I went out there because I kind of knew it inside out because of the work I'd been doing in the development of it as kind of a trainee colorist as in to train them up. And we did a film that was called America Heart and Soul, which is kind of a documentary on different aspects of American life. And there was lots of different footage shot in different ways. And we edited it together and
graded it all through the IQ. And I was the graded it all through the IQ. And I was the colorist on it because it was the first real kind of project that Fotokem put through. But I couldn't finish the project off. So I arranged for Walter to come over as a standing colorist to take over while I couldn't be there. And basically that's how he got his start as a colorist in LA. And Fotokem took him on full time at the end of
the project. And obviously he's become this very, very, very successful colorist on the back of that. And he's done brilliantly well. But he was actively involved in the development of the early days of what is now ColourSpace was then Light Space. So, you know, we've had a whole host of different people involved in the products over the years. And many of them, you know, we are still in touch with. I'm amazed to hear backstories of where people got their starts and how they have kind of
ended up where they are. I mean, Walter's amazing. He turned that into his own thing and he's ended up being very good at it. But again, like me, he was an engineer. Not a creative initially, but obviously he's turned out to be able to merge those two together in a very impressive way. And that's kind of where I come from. You know, I'm an engineer, but I ended up doing visual effects for real. And I've supervised visual effects on set. I've done the color grading. I've done
visual effects work for real. So, you know, we've done all of that. And all of that has helped develop ColourSpace. And going back to your question, that was kind of where originally it was intended, that it would be used by professionals for color management. Both, you know, calibration of displays came a little later. Initially, it was more about color management for pipelines, for workflow from cameras. through into the editing and grading side of it and the calibration.
side kind of has been added onto that later. Just one of the reasons we completely rewrote the program from Light Space to ColourSpace so that we could effectively invert it because the calibration has become a bigger part of the product rather than the color management per se. But in doing that, it's ended up being used in places we never thought of. We sell into medical because calibration for medical displays is huge, something called DICOM.
Home cinema users, we sell an extraordinary amount of software to home cinema users that want to have their... home cinema. mirroring the environment and that includes the color and all the rest of it that you get in grading houses. So the application has grown astronomically.
And then with ColourSpace, I mean I know it's always so difficult to squeeze, and I knew this was going to be hard with you anyway because there's so many things I want to talk about, but if we focus on ColourSpace for a second, someone comes to you, say they've got a home cinema or maybe they're a studio and they go, "Alright, we want to get this right." So where do they start in working with you? Realistically, it comes down to what level of calibration accuracy they're aiming for
and realistically what their budget is. You know, the software is one part of it, but the hardware associated with that can be an even bigger part in cost terms. And at the end of the day, the measurement devices that you're using dictate the level of accuracy you can attain no matter what software you use. We will obviously say that our software is the best on the planet for doing calibration and color workflows and things, but it is always limited by the ability of the devices that
you're using. That includes the display, probes and to be fair, the actual color pipeline. You'll be surprised how many times there are distortions put into it just through having a color pipeline that just isn't configured correctly. But that's the kind of thing that we can fix. And the level of fixing is down to the end user and what they are trying to attain and how much money they actually want to spend at the end of the day. I've got my list of questions here. I see my sand
timer. I'm going, "Shh, what do I do?" But okay, here's a selfish one for me. With this revolution of remote colour grading, I'm constantly dealing with clients who are, you know, they're not in my suite and they're looking at on something else. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how do you tackle something like that when you can't always manage what people are looking at things on?
Yeah, realistically, it's almost an impossible question because unless you have hands-on with whatever display devices they're using, it's impossible to guess what they are, how they're set up, what their colorability really is. I mean, we have clients that will send a probe, just a small one just to get at least better. So something like a Spyder X2 or an i1-D3 or something like that that's not overly expensive. But they're still good. They're capable of reasonably good color accuracy
if they're managed correctly. So they'll send that to the client with one of our software licenses that is the low-end side of it because you can remote access to it. So the post house that's got our full ColourSpace, XPT or whatever, they can actually control this other version of it at the client's location with a probe and they can measure the display remotely. That measurement data
comes back to the post house in ColourSpace. They can actually then generate an offset LUT within ColourSpace and just burn that into the imagery before they send it to the client. They don't have to calibrate their display, they just have to know what the display is like, what its parameters are. In doing that, you can build a lookup table and burn it into the footage before you send it. That's very clever. That's quite common, common approach nowadays. And obviously you're finding this is...
Well, no, it's not obvious, but I'm assuming this is much more common now, right? Because so many more people are doing remote work. Yeah, I mean, if people are doing remote work where they really are colluding on a project, that needs to be handled differently because they all need to know that the monitors that they're using are properly calibrated and are of a consistent level of capability. So in those situations, everybody involved realistically has got to be calibrating their displays.
Otherwise, there's too many variables to go wrong. Yeah, that's exactly it. And of course, my sand time has run out, but as always, I'm going to cheat and just, I'm going to throw one more. And again, it's a selfish question. Folks who have listened to my podcast have probably already gathered that I'm obsessed with black and white, which is ironic as a colorist. But I want to talk to you or ask you about, does calibration play a role in black and white images?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is no such thing as a black and white image. I don't mean that in the sense that they've got chromaticity values in them, because they don't. But when you're displaying them, there isn't a single channel that is black and white that goes to the monitor. It's still using the standard RGB concept of displaying an image. It's just that it is balancing them out to try to neutralize the chromaticity, reduce the saturation and
so on. But a black and white image isn't as simple as just desaturating the color. The amount of red, green and blue, if you're talking about emissive displays, will actually significantly alter your perception of a black and white image, because the balance dictates how much of one color is affecting the actual density of the black and white image, as it
were. So you can still do some seriously interesting things with black and white by understanding the mix, the ratio mixture of the three color channels being used to generate the black and white image, or to control the black and white image when you're adjusting it. I have just got to stop myself because I've got so many more, but I'll finish off with this last one. So say somebody, maybe it's a home cinema, or maybe they're a colorist who are setting up their studio, and they want to
work with you guys. So where would they start? Obviously, they look you guys up on the web, and then what happens normally? Or just reaches out? I guess normally they email or phone. Yeah, but you know, there's a lot of different options as to what kind of services you guys
can offer. If somebody knows exactly what they want, they're setting up the classic one, they're setting up a home studio to grade, maybe because they're doing work that is outside of a post studio, or they're doing stuff that they want to work remotely at home, and then go in and finish it later. They know that they've bought this monitor that's got 3D LUT capability, and it needs to be calibrated to give them a chance to be consistent with what they're doing in the post house or whatever.
And they'll go, right, I need a probe, I need software, and I just get an order. Because they know exactly what it is they need. But more often than not, people will go, we don't know where to start. We are looking to do this, we're looking to get into doing this kind of color critical work. And we have discussions. And dialogue is a lot of what we're about. I mean, the number of emails and phone calls and things that I get daily is
unbelievable. But that's part of it. The whole concept of education, training, understanding, and getting people to realise what it is that you can do is as big a part of just making a sale. Because it makes the world easier if people really understand what it is they're
trying to do and how best to approach it. I mean, this, you know, talking about sales pitching, but this this latest thing that we've literally just announced in the last few days, this thing called a Image Sequence Pro is changing the way that you can deal with virtual sets, the ability to match video walls to foreground objects, such that the camera captures the two within the same concept of colour imagery has been critical. And we just come, you know what, we'll fix this problem. And it took
us a week or two to do the software. I've got it here. I've not released it yet. It may get released today. It certainly will get released in the next couple of days. But basically, it's using a camera as a probe to measure the video wall and make sure that what the camera sees from the video wall is the same as what it would see off the foreground objects. So you can cancel out
as much as is possible. The metameric issues between, you know, what are RGB LED walls and foreground objects that are lit with better CRI lighting. There are other ways around it. Brompton using LED walls now that have got a white pixel to try to infill some of the CRI value, you know, infill colours. But even then, you still got to have the same approach, the camera will never see the different, you know, an emissive light from an LED wall with an illuminated foreground isn't
going to be seen the same. Whereas, you know, our software can fix that. Steve, you are so interesting. I'm really, really glad that we... Too bad, too bad it's out there, man. Thank you so much, so very much for coming on the show and having me, you know, having this rapid chat with me. I know there's a lot to dig into, but I'm really grateful. Thank you. That's right. No problem. Cheers, mate. Steve, thank you so much for chatting to me. That was fantastic.
After I hit stop on the recording, we continued to chat for a bit longer about some cool stuff and I kind of wish I just kept it going. Yeah, a really fascinating fellow to speak with. Thank you for joining me everybody. I will put notes as to where you can find all of Steve Shaw's information and some of the stuff he's been working on. Thank you very much to my executive producer MixingLight.com. If you don't know who they are, they can help you all things color,
MixingLight.com. To my friend of the show, Filmlight, thank you very much. To my producer, Kayla, and to you, thank you for listening. Thank you so much for listening. We've got one more episode to go and that's the end of season one. So yeah, join me next time. Thanks. See you. The Colour Timer, a micro podcast experience.