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Software to Expand Color Space
The Orphanage founders Stu Maschwitz, Joathan Rothbart and Scott Stewart originally won their visual effects stripes as the socalled Rebel Unit of George Lucas' Industrial Light + Magic, where they helped create visual effects technology used in films including Star Wars: Episode I, Sleepy Hollow and Twister. Magic Bullet, the first offering from The Orphanage, was well received as a film look emulator that transformed the crisp look of video footage to the softer, more organic look of film.
eLin for After Effects, The Orphanage's latest offering, is a suite of plug-ins and scripts for Adobe After Effects 6.5 that allows compositors to work in the expanded photographic color space of film. eLin allows After Effects users to composite film, video and 3D elements together in a unified High Dynamic Range (HDR) color space that mimics the physical properties of light.
The word eLin actually means Extended Linear, for a trait that expands what is available to artists inside After Effects to a broader and more vibrant linear gamma space. As Stu Maschwitz says, "It's a color space in which pixel values relate to one another as light does in the real world." In truth, eLin was created to offset the fact that After Effects does not have native support for High Dynamic Range floating-point file formats like Cineon. "eLin cheats floating-point performance out of After Effects' 16 bits-per-channel mode, effectively promoting every basic After Effects function to HDR," says Maschwitz.
The Orphanage has been using eLin internally for...