Singapore-based Da Vinci managing director Scott Craig spoke about the concept of real time colour correction. Da Vinci provides DATA, HDTV, and SDTV colour enhancement technology, uncompressed digital disk recording and image restoration to the world wide post-production marketplace.

Nine of the Da Vinci systems are available in India to enable real time colour correction, at a cost of US $ two million. The systems can be used to take care of different exposures at different times and lighting changes, and to correct variations in media. One can set the mood, grab viewer attention, sell products, add elements on television broadcasts with the help of these systems. One can have colour changes, introduce multiple parameters, change the lift and increase or decrease gamma gain provide color balances, change the white and luminance content, enable defocus, combine looks and make fine adjustments which are updated immediately using Da Vinci's secondary color correction facility, he said.

Contrast can be changed, whites balanced, as well as bleach bypass is possible and bright can be made to black. Using Da Vinci's secondary colour correction facility, one can change only selected colour areas by isolating them up to 20 channels, whereas in traditional systems, primary colour correction changes usually affects all colours.

Colour correction during transfers from film to tape, scene by scene control of telecine, telecine pan, tilt, zoom varispeed playback and precise control of film to video gamma is possible using Da Vinci systems, he said. Da Vinci also makes possible restoration of old film prints and transfers to DVD formats.