Color Managed Streaming using the Colorfront Engine

The Colorfront Streamer and Streaming Player integrate the powerful Colorfront Engine, an advanced color processing pipeline that ensures consistent and accurate color reproduction across various display formats and devices. 

Utilizing a human perceptual model, the Colorfront Engine enables seamless conversion between color spaces, brightness levels, and dynamic ranges, preserving the original creative intent from capture to final delivery. And because the Colorfront Engine is integrated into the Colofront Streamer, it is invaluable for today’s complex, multi-source production environments.

With Streamer and Streaming Player, users can customize input and output colorspaces, offering exceptional flexibility in managing color. This adaptability ensures an optimal viewing experience for HDR-capable displays or SDR-only devices.

How It Works: Automatic Color Management

To illustrate the Colorfront Engine in action, let’s walk through an example. Suppose you have an HDR source being streamed through the Colorfront Streamer application:

  • On Streamer, set the Input Colorspace to “Auto.”
  • On Streaming Player, if the device supports HDR, it will display the HDR image as intended.
  • If the device only supports SDR, the Colorfront Engine in Streaming Player will automatically perform a perceptual transform from HDR to SDR, ensuring the viewer sees a color-accurate SDR image.

This seamless adaptability makes the Colorfront Engine a key asset in delivering high-quality, color-accurate streams across various devices and viewing conditions.

Example: Flexible Color Management for Specific Display Devices

Let’s consider another scenario: you’re streaming an HDR source through the Colorfront Streamer application, but the final display is a digital cinema projector that requires an XYZ colorspace input. Here’s how the Colorfront Engine seamlessly handles the workflow:

  1. On Streamer:some text
    • Set the Input Colorspace to “Auto” to ensure the HDR source is correctly identified.
  2. On Streaming Player:some text
    • Set the input colorspace to HDR and the Output Colorspace to XYZ, which feeds to the projector. 
    • The projector receives the XYZ signal and displays an accurate representation of the HDR source.
  3. On Stream Manager:some text
    • One can monitor the current colorspace conversion settings in all players connected to the stream.

This workflow showcases the Colorfront Engine’s ability to handle complex color transformations, ensuring the original creative intent is maintained, regardless of the output device’s requirements. Whether streaming to HDR-capable devices, SDR displays, or specialized systems like projectors in XYZ colorspace, the Colorfront Engine delivers precise, consistent results every time. To learn more about Colorfront and our streaming solutions, please visit Colorfront.cloud.

Get latest news
from Colorfront