A Career Empowering Colorists: Talking with Peter Postma

How FilmLight’s Peter Postma helps develop standards and FilmLight’s approach to color grading

Today, I talked to Peter Postma – Managing Director, Americas at FilmLight. Formerly at Kodak and a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology. He was a part of the team that deployed the first hardware that could apply a LUT in real-time and was on the committee that developed the CDL. He’s also active in the development of ACES.

Peter has made a career of creating workflows and standards that are easy to take for granted. Our conversation covers everything from ACES to rendering images for the new Sphere in Las Vegas. Plus, we talk about the innovative new features in Baslight v6 and its new perceptual color space.

Note: Baselight 6 is now released. At the time of this recording, it was in beta.

Key takeaways from this Insight

• How CDLs were developed as a communication tool with DPs
• The evolution of ACES
• How HDR introduces creative challenges
• The process of emulating photochemical processes
• Why Film Processing improved after the introduction of digital tools
• How Baselight evolved
• Why BaseGrade uses Human Perceptual Space for color grading
• Avoiding secondary corrections with better primary tools
• The look development tools of ChromoGen
• How color grading in the cloud is becoming possible
• Producing color workflows for the Las Vegas Sphere

External Links

• Peter’s IMDb
• FilmLight Website
• ACES
• Dolby Vision
• TrueLight
• BaseLight
• TeleCine
• BLG Tools
• BaseLight 6.0 New Features Datasheet
• Colour: Sense & Measurement by Richard Kirk (PDF) – This is the book Kali mentions in this interview
• Las Vegas Sphere

Related Mixing Light Insights

• What is a CDL and When Do You Use It – Take an introductory look at the Color Decision List (CDL) and learn about the strengths and weaknesses of an ASC-CDL-based workflow.
• A Complete Guide to Baselight’s Base Grade Operator – Luke Ross helps you master every Base Grade operator control in Baselight – and challenges Resolve users to figure out equivalent operations.
• LUTs: Mixing Light Tutorial Category – A listing of all Mixing Light Insights tagged with ‘LUT’.
• Flight Path: What is ACES, and how do you use it? – In this Flight Path, you learn what ACES is and how the post-production pipeline is executed. ACES-related acronyms are broken down, and you learn how to set up ACES on several different, common software platforms.
• Series: Learning Baselight Look – Luke Ross’ 20-part series on learning Baselight Look (formerly Baselight Student), for newbies and experienced colorists alike.

Questions or Comments? Leave a comment!

Did you enjoy this interview? Let me know! I’m curious if you found this helpful, if you have something to add, or if you have more questions you’d like me to ask of professional colorists in the future?

– Kali