AJA ColorBox manages the color of the new Masterwork Films chroma studio

Masterwork Films, a company specialized in cinematographic content oriented to business contexts, has created a virtual studio based on green screens and supported by technological solutions such as ColorBox and Gen10 from AJA, or the Unreal engine Epic Games.

Channeling his passion for cinema, Bureau Florin founded Masterwork Films and 2024. He currently runs the company and acts as director of photography on client shoots for brand storytelling projects, films, advertisements and masterclasses. In addition to serving clients in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada, Biro and his team manage a studio of green screen virtual production and an equipment rental business: “Virtual production can be expensive if you build sets and virtual worlds from scratch, so we're trying to hit a middle ground with our new studio, where we can get a good result with stock and market assets.”

The new U-shaped green screen set of Masterwork It is six meters wide and three and a half meters deep. It has up to 3 cameras that send an SDI signal REDWideGamutRGB (Log) of the talent and the green screen to your keyer while a PC sends another SDI signal that carries the virtual camera feed Unreal Engine, which also uses REDWideGamutRGB (Log). He keyer It receives the camera signal as a foreground and removes a flat green background, leaving a foreground alpha layer of the actor, as well as receiving the Unreal Engine SDI signal as a background signal and applies it as a foreground background layer.

Since both the foreground and background signals are REDWideGamutRGB, the composite image in the keyer It has the same flat appearance. To solve this issue, Biro's team sends that flat video signal through SDI to one AJA ColorBox and use Assimilate Live Looks to correct color. They then send the graded output to trusted monitors of the director and actors using the output SDI by ColorBox. “Whether in a virtual production or on a traditional set, there is something magical about being able to use a device like ColorBox to load a LUT and get a rough vision of how things will look, as well as having the control to adjust color and contrast in real time,” explains the head of Masterwork.

ColorBox, according to Biro, also saves the team time because they can do everything on the computer without having to process the signal 4:2:2 of 10 bit that are rolling; receives the signal and outputs exactly the same signal with its LUT. Additionally, Biro's equipment can loop SDI out or pass through, so you can send a signal from the ColorBox to two recorders: one with the color grading and the original signal as it comes out of the compositing server.

Beyond ColorBox, Masterwork Films uses a AJA Gen10 Sync Generator since the tracking solutions of your cameras and lenses have reference inputs genlock y SDI: "Before Gen10, the background would stutter when we moved the cameras. I quickly realized that we needed a device to sync all these devices doing genlock, so I installed Gen10 and the stuttering has disappeared; it's been amazing."