UK based color management specialist Light Illusion has developed a new application for its MatchLight Image Matching System to maintain the viability of long-term film based archiving for digital images. With the explosion in digital cinematography capture and the associated difficulty in providing guaranteed long-term archiving of the images Light Illusion was asked by a number of clients to look at possible long-term archive solutions based on the use of standard film stocks as film has unquestionably the best long-term archiving qualities of any storage medium presently in use. The problem with the use of film has been guaranteeing the accuracy of the recovered digital image due to the variable nature of the recorded film image and setting within the film transfer scanner or telecine. The company says Light Illusion’s solution overcomes these problems completely. According to Light Illusion MatchLight IMS is a system that auto-generates a LUT from two versions of the same image (or string of images) basically a before/after comparison with the difference between the two being converted into a LUT for use within any color based system or via Vulcan Light Illusion’s ultra fast and scalable command line application for large volume batch image processing. The use of MatchLight IMS means that by applying a short string of technical images before each and every archive it is possible to guarantee the recovered image integrity after re-scanning with the original technical images and the re-scanned versions of the same images being used within MatchLight IMS to auto generate the required calibration LUT to return the scanned images to their original color dynamic range and contrast generating a near perfect clone of the original images. The results using Kodak Intermediate stock have proven to be very very accurate - to the point where visually the match is perfect with just small variations being seen when technically assessing the images at a pixel level.
