Brompton Technology at frame:work:losangeles 2023: TrueLight and G1

it's great to be here this morning at framework my first time here and um was really inspired Yesterday by the discussion about the framework ethos and I particularly liked the term that was being used the Pixel People um and that that really led me to thinking about where Brompton fits into this um and and my sort of uh I like to think of our sort of internal ethos is really um we are the people to whom you entrust your very carefully crafted pixels so you spend a lot of time on and maybe you've been up all night creating you give them over to us to display on on a screen and I ethos to try and get those pixels the best they can possibly be to display them as truthfully and to give you all the tools to create the best possible pixels so I'm going to talk a bit about the future of LED systems today um we're all pretty familiar with LED stages that we're we're on but where are they going to go so to start with a little bit about bromton um brompton's background and indeed my background is like many people here I've been hearing in Live Events our team that founded Brompton started our lives really in light and control um and so we had a really key understanding of how events work how you get a show done all system is the brains behind these screens so we take your video signal and we we derive those control signals for the LEDs starting our live in Live Events cameras were really important from the very start our system's been designed from the ground up to work with cameras and we spent a lot of time developing the industry-leading features and color system really focused on those Live Events but always with cameras in mind including our unique Dynamic calibration and this made runton the really ideal fit for virtual production as that technology started to emerge for me my background is in Live Events but I also had the privilege to work in feature film visual effects for a few years so when this technology came together it was amazing for me to bring together those those two interests of mine and really for Bronson we're interested in any area of display where quality is the focus we're constantly focusing on equality and how we can improve systems in the virtual production space where we've been involved almost since the very beginning of these led screens we've kind of got the basics done it kind of works and what we've been really focusing on for the past few years is building the key tools that people need to bridge the gap between different Technologies and people with different backgrounds and we've built some Fantastic Tools to solve key problems like having the LED processing system speak the same language as DPS things like shutter angle a concept that that you know most LED systems didn't understand you can now talk to Brompton natively about shutter angles and we understand what that means we've also been building tools to connect the dit and the gaffer to the LED system so they can use the systems that they're familiar with with the language that DPS are familiar with to control this new technology and giving them all that creative power that comes from that so what's next we've kind of got the basics down where are we going to go what can we improve and I'm sort of thinking about this from the perspective of you know how can we improve quality efficiency and give people better workflows so to enable all this we found we really need a new platform a huge amount of the power of a Brompton system lives in the tiles themselves only the tile already knows about the properties of all its pixels and it's not really practical to move that data around into a central location so we do a lot of the work there and to drive developments that we wanted to do we needed a new platform it's not something we do lightly at Brompton our R2 card has been around for nine years it's still the most powerful receiver card on the market and it continues to be in many many quality metrics simply the best product we've been continuously updating it over the years when we started we didn't have hjr and dynamic calibration we added that in the past few years we've added shutter sync to a label to you to match their LED refresh very precisely to the shutter and even in this past year we've added extended bit depth massively increasing the dynamic range available on tiles and these updates have all come to existing platforms so people investing in Brompton have got a lot of value out of that but we needed more power we need more to extend and that's why we launched this year our new receiver card the G1 this is a next-gen receiver card for those next-gen panels pushing on in towards new technologies new ideas that people haven't even come up with yet to give you a bit of a flavor of what the G1 is it's about 20 times more powerful than our R2 receiver card which was already the most powerful on the market it enables larger finer panels up to a million pixels on a single receiver card and we can drive them faster up to a thousand frames per second it's worth noting that the panels that this card can drive don't exist yet they don't they're not on the market so we are really looking at the future and what could be possible the panel takes 10 gig fiber straight to it and this really simplifies distribution cabling we can take 5.25 million pixels done one cable at 60 frames a second so it's a really powerful platform and to give you an idea of what that power really translates to this is a fantastic audience I know you guys will actually get this that is a 720p display in a single panel driven by a single receiver card so it's crazy powerful it's a platform for the future so what have we built on top of this well today I'm really going to focus on one technology that we've been developing which is actually a little bit different and it's called true lights so to explain why True Light is important we want to when this is very much driven by by virtual production I need to just consider what the LED volume in a icvfx workflow is doing it's a background it forms the background of the camera replacing that green screen giving us our final shot in camera it's a source of Reflections and it's a source of the lighting as well particularly diffuse environmental lines and this is where we run into one of the problems with displays at the moment so all the displays we're familiar with they work using RGB they have a red pick red green and a blue component to each pixel and the reason why they do this is really simple right that's how we see it's a very efficient way to produce a display you want to excite each of the the eyes three receptors for the three different colors so by using red green and blue we can produce any color within a gamut it's a very efficient mechanism and that is ubiquitous in our industry right all our cameras seen RGB we all work in RGB in post and in you know when we're moving budget around and I'll just laser RGB and that means what we like to say at Brompton that there's one right answer so essentially given an RGB triplet when we input that into our display there is a correct answer to what that pixel is meant to do and that is the correct answer that we are Brompton always trying to find but that isn't really how light works it's a bit more subtle than that so these two spectral distributions are trying to represent the same color so using a RGB display we end up with what is this very peaky Spectrum we've got our red green and blue components and there's some areas of the spectrum that aren't really covered whereas a real daylight Spectra that looks the same color when it illuminates say a white object might look like this so what is the difference between these Spectra actually mean well that corresponds to the term color rendering so color rendering is the ability of a light source to illuminate objects Faithfully in the way we'd expect and because of this spiky spectral output these RGB sources have very poor color rendering they produce they don't produce lots of colors under illumination very accurately we can do a few things with this we can use broader spectral output but that comes with some trade-offs it reduces our color gamut on our ability to uh to reproduce these more saturated colors so Bronson we've been working on a solution which we call True Light and True Light support are all about adding an extra emitter to each pixel but in developing True Light we wanted it to be a zero compromise solution we didn't want to take any steps back in terms of quality or functionality so true light is a fully spectrally aware calibration system built on top of our our existing Dynamic calibration that enables that extra emitter to improve color rendering it's a full pixel calibration system zero compromises I'm going to play a short clip and then we'll dive into what True Light really looks like [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] okay so that was a little intro into into True Light a bit of an overview of the the technology let's go into a bit more detail about about what's going on here so these are some comparison images um that we've we've generated based on this technology and it's worth noting these don't use any conventional lighting that's not to say that conventional lighting won't be used with this technology but everything you're seeing in these these images is all illumination from rgbw panels using this true light technology we'll cover in a second exactly what we mean by rgbw but for the purposes of this demonstration let's just look at what the color rendering the quality is like so this is a this is our model illuminated under this true light technology light and this is what it looks like under RGB so this is what you're getting in every volume today if I flip back and forth you can see that our all our red tones are massively over saturated and hyped and we've got a really quite nasty red cast in the skin if we look at a split screen we can really see this uh see this effect quite markedly so once you've seen this and I've had this experience myself when you walk into an LED volume from now on you will not be able to not see it there's this horrible red cast you walk into a volume you've got this lovely you know Mountain scene with a beautiful blue sky you should be a really nice cold illumination you look at everybody and they're all red where's this red coming from it just looks completely wrong on darker skin tones the effect is is a bit more subtle but it's just as real and this clip we can also see we're seeing a strange color shift in the shirt as well if we look at this on objects and we see a similar effect um and I really like this this demonstration this is actually something we did at a trade show again we're just Illuminating these objects with um with actually an HDR still that's being emitted from these led panels and as I've been going through these clips I've actually been demonstrating to you a very unique capability of the Brompton system which is actually to produce exactly the same colors but with completely different spectral quality so I'm going to flip between a couple of images this is the rgbw illumination so we've got that really nice quality to it um when I go to RGB you will see the color rendering change radically but what's kind of unique about this is that if you look at the white chips as I switch between the two packets work sorry you'll see that they aren't changing at all so our illumination quality in terms of white is completely consistent but if you look over on the right hand side of the oranges you'll see they're changing color almost completely under RGB illumination which is this the Orange is kind of melt into their red bag you can't really see orange tones at all and our Reds are really hyped they're out of balance with the other primaries but under rgbw light suddenly our oranges are their correct color our color rendering has been massively improved and all of our tones sit back together if we look at this on a color Checker chart but I'm sure a lot of people are very familiar with from color workflows we can kind of see this effect personified so here we've got the same color tracker under these different illuminations and we can see our red tone under RGB illumination the saturate is really really oversaturated compared to the other primaries but under rgbw illumination it looks much better similarly we can see our skin tone shifting and we can see that very strange effect on orange orange is a very saturated and very red so what's actually going on here I showed you some Spectra earlier well these are the real Spectra of this panel that we've developed so indirect view we get the spiky Spectra and by adding this fourth emitter we can make a much broader more continuous spectrum and that's what's giving us our better color rendering we've actually got lighter all these different wavelengths the we've chosen in our solution to support four emitters there are other other products on the market that are going for more but in LED panels four emitters is a very good choice it's a very good trade-off between the the massively increased complexity of the drive system and the results and there's lots of research backing this up using a white led to make pale colors is actually also much more efficient in terms of power we're seeing between a 10 20 power saving for certain colors and the screens get less hot they have better viewing angle characteristics and better linearity characteristics as well so there are a lot of benefits now we're a processing manufacturer so to do this we need panels to work with and the first rgbw panel on the market is something we've developed with row the row carbon 5 rgbw available to order now and what row I've chosen for that is actually a warm white LED and this gives a really good performance across a wide range of color temperatures if we look at our Spectra again we can see that this is trying to produce white at d65 6500 Kelvin and we actually need quite a lot of blue in that in that Spectrum to get that cool color and you can see on this diagram on the right hand side there's a kind of Gray Line as opposed to the black and that's actually the Spectra of the white LED on its own and you can see what we're doing is we're adding a lot of blue in there to get get 6500 Kelvin now it might be tempting to choose a a very cool white LED you will be a bit more efficiency because you won't have to use your blue LED but that's actually probably a mistake because we can easily add in blue we have a blue LED but once that blue spikes there we can't take it away developing these panels is actually pretty challenging um there are going to be a lot of problems in terms of trying to actually Source these led packages we need that extra emitter and the industry as a whole is not not particularly set up to make these these panels so this is what we've developed with row but we will be seeing lots more panels come to the market from all the different manufacturers to start with we'll probably see mostly quite coarse panels that are really good for ceilings they're useful for lighting trucks and things like that but our vision is that complete volumes can move to this technology and we're able to drive that the other unique part of the Brompton implementation of this is color accuracy and having an actually color accurate output is by far the best workflow so when we've been setting up these systems to test this and demo it what we've found is that if if you get a an OD screen backdrop and you get some of these panels that are properly calibrated with this extra extra emitter um and the output is color accurate then it it gives you a much quicker time to having a plausible looking scene you immediately get light with the correct color precisely the correct color but also with this nice quality the objects in the scene immediately sit back they always blend they blend with the backdrop and that gets you much closer to your your desired final result with a lot less tweaking enable you to need to be much more creative we're able to do this because Brompton has developed the hydro system which drives our calibration and the hydro system shipped from the factory able to handle these fourth emitters and that's that's completely unique in the market this Builds on top of our Dynamic calibration technology which gives you a lot of flexibility to set up the screen how you want to pick a color space to trade off various different characteristics of the screen but rather than other than other systems where that's all fixed at the factory you get this complete Dynamic capability with Brompton and we also build on top of that the rest of the feature set that we've spent a long time developing in particular pure tone which enables us to linearize the output of the panel giving you much more accurate eotf results so getting the right colors the right the right brightnesses and also things like thermocal that we can use to compensate for the thermal effects on the panel building on this Dynamic nature we're able to offer Much More Much More control and feedback and I just want to highlight um just one control that we've got here which what we call Spectral preference so in the Brompton system you can tell us what you'd like the screen to do so if your spectral preference is set to narrow zero percent we don't use your fourth emitter at all if it's set to 100 we use as much as we possibly can giving you that that massively improved color rendering it gives us a flexible solution for tuning for the use case in the environment but it is very computationally complex and that's why we've needed to use the G1 platform to build this on top of all that extra power is giving us the ability to make these trade-offs in real time I should note that I've been talking about rgbw um but we have little Joker Brompton that W stands for whatever so actually we can cope with any fourth emitter and the calibration system deals with the different performance so we can deal with these warm lights we've got in these panels we can also do with cool whites we can actually also deal with emitters that are outside the gamut we've when we're building this as with all the Bronson features that we now develop we're we're putting behind it a full API integration so this can be controlled from third-party Control Systems from lighting desks again giving that power to DPS and Gaffers to actually fully control this um and we've also built in this spectral preview which really shows you what's going on the difference between these Spectra and it's pretty remarkable the way that energy gets redistributed with this emitter again we're trying to produce a fairly cool white um for this this color sample we can see that under RGB we have a very strong red Spike but when we start using our white LED we don't actually need to use the red at all it's completely off um giving us this wonderful color rendering now I'm an engineer so I can't leave you without some graphs and some data so this is the real data from the row rgbw panel that we've got there's one outside if you've got your spectrometer with you and you want to measure it feel free and we can kind of see exactly what we've been talking about so the Spectra is much less spiky it's we filled in those oranges and yellow hues um in the middle we've got some CRI measurements and it's quite small but the way CRI works is it kind of gives you a score for all the different colors and for red we get a score of negative 80. so it's almost and the worst possible score is negative 100 in under RGB illumination so our accuracy of Illuminating red objects is incredibly poor it's absolutely terrible and when we introduce this Broadband emitter that situation improves massively and finally on the right we've got some measurements of tm30 which is quite a an interesting Modern Way of trying to measure color rendering and our Fidelity scores going from from 60 to 82. so tm30 also gives us a really nice sort of visual representation so you can kind of see um in in the on the left there's a uh there are two circles a perfect light source the two circles will be perfect on top of each other so the red circle will will sit perfectly on top of the black so what we can see is under our RGB illumination our greens our science and our Reds are being shifted around and when we introduce our fourth emitter and we smooth out the Spectrum we get much closer to that that perfect circle so finally I'm just going to talk a little about the applications for this and we started from virtual production and that is the obvious place and that's the that's what's Driven this technology to be able to be developed this isn't really that new right lights have been doing this for a long time ever since people realized they could make a you know a a light for domestic use or for theater with LEDs they round this problem but it's quite different to do that in a video system video systems need to respect very precise input colorimetry that single right answer that I was telling you about before and we also have to do this for a large number of pixels potentially millions of pixels at quite High frame rates much higher than is generally deployed in lighting so we've needed virtual production and XR to really help this technology come to Market to give us the impetus to develop it but now we have it there are a lot wider usages of it so basically anything where an LED panel illuminates someone is a candidate or an object is a candidate for for this technology so fashion in retail designers pick colors very carefully and they want those colors to be Faithfully reproduced you could imagine even in a in a store where you're say selling shoes and you've got some LED screen behind them the light from that LED screen is going to be Illuminating those products and it's going to be giving them these wild color shifts they're not going to look correct we've also actually had a lot of interest in this technology and Live Events if you've got a massive stage and you've got quite bright content all your costumes and all your set pieces are going to look the wrong color so that's really interesting again virtual production drove us to develop this technology but it has much wider applications and finally it's a buzzword but imagine the metaverse conference room of the future where a whole wall is an OD screen that would be a fantastic experience communicating with your colleagues across the world looking at them like you're looking through a giant window onto their conference room but imagine how awful that's going to be if everyone looks really red I like to say your exacts will look like lobsters now and that's not going to be a great experience so actually having this good quality light this correct color rendering has a very wide range of applications as I said we've got the panel outside please do come and see it and it's a fascinating technology and I think it's going to change the game in Virtual production as well as in these other areas and that's all from me but happy to answer any questions thank you for listening

2023-08-30 11:04

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