Welcome to the Colour Timer Podcast. I am your host Vincent Taylor. This is the podcast where we speak to professionals who work with colour and today I am speaking to Tom Huczek. He is the founder of Time In Pixels, the creator of Nobe OmniScope. I am very much looking forward to this conversation because I'm a big fan of this product. I've been using OmniScope for about six months and I just adore it. It's amazing. But Timing Pixels also has some other
products as well which I'm going to speak about. 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 colour to tell stories. Welcome to the Colour Timer with Vincent Taylor. Hey Tom, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. How are you doing? Yeah, not too bad. Not too bad. I'm dealing with cold LA which of course is not cold
anywhere else in the world but it's cold for me. So I've got a little remember to start the sand timer note down here because sometimes I'll start the interview and then I forget to do it. So before we go any further we can start go any further we can start the game show and away we go. Perfect. You have the game show and away we go. Perfect. You have
done a lot of interviews. I was doing some research and you know you've done a fair few number of interviews and it's not surprising because Time In Pixels has brought this incredible product has brought this incredible product You know, Nobe OmniScope but I kind of want to go way back first to find out who you are and how on earth you got into this world. Yeah, so the journey was you got into this world. Yeah, so the journey was
kind of long actually. I'm a software developer by profession and I have been doing it for many many years now. I started a completely different field in banking sector initially and telecommunications but my programming hobby projects always related one way or the other to some visual things. So early on I looked into game development, some graphics programming. So I always liked something visual that I could impact myself that I could code some interesting things into the visual
things on screen. So this was like my hobby early on and then at some point I picked up photography and I think this was a turning point in my career because I became really passionate about photography. So I spent every minute every hour that I could on getting out with my camera or working in Photoshop trying to post-process my pictures then learning about gear, about lenses, about the cameras, about all the gear. So
down the rabbit hole. Yeah, this became like really really big passion of mine and I spent probably a couple of years really getting into all the details, everything I could basically. Some of this transitioned slowly into motion picture. At some point I started taking time lapses then I started using DaVinci Resolve to color grade time lapses and then I become interested how to post-process motion picture not only
the still pictures but videos. So this turned into us because I learned that you're doing something a little different here. It's not like applying 20 layers in Photoshop to make the picture look really good but you had to approach it differently. So that's on its own became interesting to me. Oh this is different. So I need to learn why it's different and how to achieve something
good-looking but another way. So I learned DaVinci Resolve, I started watching all those tutorials, how to use it, how color is basically approach color in videos and so on. And at some point my profession somewhat merged with my passion of photography and this video related things and I found myself a small project to start on and this first small project was basically a
false color plugin. I heard somewhere, I think it was a DP saying that he relies on false color on set a lot and he would like to have false color in post production as well to see the false color overlay in the grading suite with his colorist because he speaks false color language on set that the contrast ratios, the exposure levels between the frames and he was lacking the false color on screen in grading suite and I the false color on screen in grading suite and I thought to myself okay that
sounds like fairly easy thing to sounds like fairly easy thing to implement and this is the point when I started actually using my software development skills in the filmmaking world and this is how basically the first product of Time in Pixels got creatived. That's amazing I love that you say it seemed fairly easy I'm just going yeah not to my brain. Yeah you said like first product tell me tell me
about the products that Time in pixels makes. So on our website you will see four products basically at the current moment and the main one is Nobe OmniScope and which is probably yeah it's the only standalone application and the rest false color, nobe display and nobe color map are plugins. Primarily for DaVinci Resolve but most of them work also with Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, also for Photoshop and some other platforms that support OpenFX
plugins. So the false color that I already mentioned was the first one which is basically a tool known from
cameras that DP uses. I think recently started appearing in software in various tools now we already have built in false color in DaVinci Resolve but when I created false color plugin it was not there it was probably the first software version of the false color that you could use on a computer but it's yeah fairly simple it turns luminosity into some predefined ranges of color and so the idea at least was pretty easy and pretty simple and then there was little enhancement to the false color
that a lot of people asked me to do to create like separate view of the false color so you can work in DevInch Resolve and without the abstracted view in your viewer so you could see the original image in the viewer but you could also see the false color as a scope on your separate screen so I implemented that and then I got a lot of questions can you can you make this preview of just the image without the false color so basically creating external view external preview of your
image so that was basically removing the false color from the application and this is how Nobe Display got created with some extra features and enhancements down the line and after that I created Nobe Color Remap which was slightly more complicated and more advanced plugin for DaVinci Resolve where you have this hue circle and you can remap various hues and saturation on
the grid. Right now you have this color warper in DaVinci Resolve which which is pretty much what it was back then when it wasn't available in DaVinci Resolve but yeah it was it was a really nice project for me to to dive into color models transitions between different hue saturations in different color models so it was a lot of color theory and an experimentation that gave me some solid base for for the future projects after that which was that a was that a
coincidence then that the very similar thing now appears in Resolve or or or you know I don't know I don't really know I can only say that's fair but it got pretty popular and a lot of colorists were saying that it's a great tool but it's too slow for them because they use grading panel and they don't want to use mouse to track the points to open effects plugins so so the native version will will win always so yeah yeah it just became reality unfortunately for me but
what to do. This is a kind of a you know basic 101 question but it's I think it's really important because you know we we use scopes in in our industry as colorists or as editors so here's the question why are scopes important? Scopes are basically measurement tool and they give you completely objective technical view.
You might have very pricey reference monitor and it's very accurate but your brain can play a lot of tricks on you and having scopes give you like not color by perception you or your mood so it's sort of like absolute values of sort of like absolute values of the image that you're working on so I would say that's that's the main reason for using scopes if you spend hours grading the footage your eyes won't give you objective view on the image so you can always rely on your scopes to check
the levels to check and the saturation the highlights in the shadows so yeah I think it's indispensable tool in the colorist 100% I remember oh my gosh years ago I think I don't know I don't know be grading maybe three or four years and I went to a it was just little tiny post house and they didn't have any scopes and this was before resolve had scopes built into it I think it must have been and I remember going that's okay I'm not sure how much I actually use my scopes
anyway and I didn't realize how much you know I'm glancing at them all the time you know subconsciously you're just kind of glancing at them all the time just check and it was really hard to grade without just check and it was really hard to grade without them you know yeah to kind of just trust your eyes I you know speaking of the past you know so back in the day I had my little Tektronics scopes in my suite in my next my little pogol and 20 years ago I guess it was and and now we've
and 20 years ago I guess it was and and now we've got Nobe OmniScope and here's a real nasty question What makes Nobe OmniScope, like better I would say that OmniScope shares some of the benefits of the hardware scope one would be to offload your main station so you're not running software scopes on the same machine that you're grading and scopes usually take some of your GPU processing power so it's good to have them separately on a separate machine
yeah and also you're monitoring external signal you're monitoring the same signal that goes to your reference monitor so there is no room for error for misconfiguration within DaVinci Resolve or differently like log color space that you're monitoring or some I don't know layer that is not visible on your reference screen but somehow gets into into the scope preview on in the software so it's more like independent from from your workstation and the benefits that hardware scopes don't have is
basically constant improvement constant updates the hardware scopes they are not constant updates the hardware scopes they are not so that different from the scopes five years ago 10 years ago 15 years ago the majority of the changes are like new video standards high resolution probably some of the HDR features and and that's it and with Nobe OmniScope we can implement any customer feedback feature request and have new version within a week or two weeks or a couple of months if the feature is
really big so Nobe OmniScope reacts to really big so Nobe OmniScope reacts to the environment to the changing situation to basically any idea that's interesting and it's worth looking and I would say that's probably 80% of the features in OmniScope are coming from from the customers from the community feels like you know every other week I check and feels like you know every other week I check and there's something new that's come with with OmniScope which which is amazing
is there I don't know if you can talk about this but is there anything kind of in the pipeline that's coming up well there's there's our To-Do list is huge so it's a matter of what's the most interesting and most most valuable we've got some really interesting features ready but we cannot release them due to some licensing things not resolved yet so hopefully we'll be able to announce some some of that but I think a very interesting feature that should be available very
soon is SDI out support so you'll be able to to use your deck link monitor card to output the signal out of Omniscope so you can chain and the signal out of Omniscope or you can basically send out the scope preview Right. That's cool.
other way to you know recently very recently there's been the selection of tutorial videos that Daria has done that have come out which are really great like they they just very really nicely paced and just kind of really spelled spell it out and I love that I love that you guys have gone to the trouble of just making these accessible for everyone so everyone understands what's going on it's really tremendous yeah I think it was really necessary and what
Daria is doing is really great and I think she's she's like ideal person for for this task yeah she's really really good and she for this task yeah she's really really good and she and she just said today do you work with her to do those or is that something she's doing on it kind of on her own? We work on it together yeah more of the
on her own? We work on it together yeah more of the work is probably on her side but but we talk about this and we shape each each video together yeah I started video together yeah I started off once again my my time has run out the 15 minutes goes so quickly and I've got a whole lot more questions but two other things I just really quickly wanted to squeeze in at the end I started off the interview by saying you know you've done a lot of interviews and I'm curious are there any questions you
wish someone would ask you yeah for wish someone would ask you yeah for example very interesting one would be the future in our field what's what's coming to our field and I would say that that VR technology as well as AI in every corner I think it will have a big impact on post-production tools and as well as the hardware that we're using for basically working with video I think it will even change all the things in the post-production pipeline yeah I am and this is
this the last thing I want to finish off with I'm really impressed with the support that comes from your company can you tell me what kind of you know someone was going to jump into OmniScope what kind of support they they can get?
I think the best place for that person would be to go to our Discord channel it's where everything happens the bug reports the idea request the feature requests or basically you can ask any question there so if if I'm not there there are many many people involved in the project that might answer the question or suggest a solution so it's it's probably the best place to start yeah that's great yeah um thank you so much thanks for I know it's like it's this tiny little amount
of time to talk about so much but it's a it's a great to get an overview and and I mean I'm a little bit biased because I think that Omniscope is amazing and it's just kind of I was I was off and on wether I should get it and then a couple of colorist friends of mine who I really respect they said mate once you get it you won't go back and there and it's absolutely true I mean it's a fantastic product so well done thank you all right thanks mate thanks for chatting thanks for having me.
Tom, thank you so much for taking time out to come on the color time of podcast it was really really great to speak with you if folks want to know more about Omniscope or any of the other products from Time In Pixels, you can check out the show notes thank you for listening or watching and like and subscribe and all that kind of stuff it does help thank you to my executive producer MixingLight.com if you're looking at this or listening to this on their website you
already know what they do but if not check out MixingLight.com they can help you with all things color a really wonderful asset thanks for listening and see you next time. The color timer a micro podcast experience