ASSIMILATE Ships SCRATCH Lab Digital Lab Application on Mac OS X & Windows

ASSIMILATE, the leading provider of powerful post-production tools for digital workflows, announced the release of SCRATCH Lab, the industry‘s first digital lab tool for on-location workflows and VFX dailies pipelines.

Released simultaneously on Mac OS X and Windows 7, and aggressively priced at $4,995 USD, SCRATCH Lab is a comprehensive end-to-end digital system for the review, versioning, color correction, conform and deliverables of dailies created during production, or the VFX process. SCRATCH Lab‘s flexible design and intuitive and customizable user interface allow it to be easily deployed across a broad range of tasks for 2D and 3D stereo projects, up to 5K resolution and beyond.

SCRATCH Lab is paired with SCRATCH Six also, which was also released today on Mac and Windows. SCRATCH Six is ASSIMILATE‘s high-performance, digital cinema and broadcast finishing tool for RED and other high-end digital workflows.

When used on-location for a digital shoot, SCRATCH Lab replaces the photochemical lab. Its speed and real-time capabilities deliver significant time savings for DITs, data wranglers, colorists, VFX teams, DPs, directors and producers. SCRATCH Lab can organize digital negatives by day, unit, camera, scene, shot or take, and allows an unlimited number of versions in a single view, without import or rendering. It supports all popular RAW camera formats, and carries scene, take, audio and 3D stereo convergence metadata through the entire project.

To aid clear communication between the set and other departments, SCRATCH Lab also offers the most creative review and comments tools in the industry, such as remote review via HTML, and Sticky Notes that allow comments from any reviewer to be viewed throughout the project.

In VFX dailies pipelines, SCRATCH Lab is optimized for DPX, OpenEXR, RAW, plus all other popular review/deliverable formats, and can playback resolutions of up to 5K in real time. This enables users to load and playback media in any combination of format, resolution and color space on the same view. Furthermore, SCRATCH Lab can be easily automated to perform difficult or repetitive tasks, such as selecting aspect ratios or correcting frame offsets, enabling significant time savings.

XML support facilitates smooth integration with even the most complex media databases, to load thousands of media clips per day, regardless of format, codec or resolution.

Jody Neckles, feature film and commercials DIT: "For on-set dailies work, SCRATCH Lab packages all the tools I need to support all camera formats into one product. It has powerful real-time review capabilities, and can generate dailies in all the different formats required by a production – for editorial, iPads and the web. Crucially, with its advanced color management tools, I can apply LUTs non-destructively to the digital files, and manage different looks through the duration of a shoot. In short, it‘s great!"

Danielle Costa – production manager for VFX at Marvel Entertainment : "The best thing about SCRATCH Lab is that it can playback, in real-time, any media that you throw at it - all in the same view - such as RED RAW, ARRIRAW, DPX, EXR files, QTs and JPEGs. Plus, it‘s straightforward to integrate with an existing database, so it flawlessly managed the thousands of 2D and 3D stereo shots and versions during post production on Thor (Marvel Entertainment/ Paramount Pictures). SCRATCH Lab solves a big challenge in motion picture review playback by bringing different media together at your fingertips, and instantly showing them in the best possible quality."

Michael Wrightson, director of operations UK, at Prime Focus in London: "With the launch of SCRATCH Lab, ASSIMILATE is keeping pace with the evolving needs of the production and post production industries. As a busy VFX vendor on commercials and features, we are always looking for new and better ways to streamline our 2D and 3D stereo VFX pipelines. The well-designed and comprehensive toolset delivered by SCRATCH Lab fits the bill."

Gary Curran, head of DI at Screen Scene, Dublin, Ireland: "SCRATCH Lab addresses the way the industry has changed with new cameras, codecs and file formats. As the data hub of our pipeline, we can ingest, manage and prepare pretty much any format in SCRATCH Lab and give our other departments – grading, editorial, VFX – the media they need in the format they want. Having such power and flexibility all in one machine is very handy, especially on the Mac platform as you can write to ProRes, as well as DNxHD."

SCRATCH Lab‘s comprehensive toolset and functionality includes:
• Broad range of input/output formats for 2D/3D stereo, native RED RAW.R3D, ARRI RAW, Phantom, Panasonic P2, DSLRs, plus DNxHD MXF, AVCHD, DPX, and QT inc ProRes* (*Mac OS version only)
• Real-time playback at up to 5K and beyond, with audio sync
• Powerful, interactive Primary Grading toolset including curves
• Unlimited, non-destructive versioning
• Full 1D, 3D LUT and CDL support
• Fast, accurate and flexible conform with Dual-View, Half-Mix and Side-by-Side comparisons, plus Quick Keys for moving through timelines and edit tools for shot manipulation
• Support for Avid‘s Artist Color and Tangent Wave and CP 200 panels
• Powerful, integrated 3D stereo tools
• Process automation and integration with other applications via XML
• Remote review and comment via HTML
• Automated HTML deliverable templates to simultaneous outputs based on format, metadata, and LUTs/grades