You may have heard of the name Assimilate from Assimilate Scratch, a powerful tool for conforming, color, compositing, and finishing VFX work. The company is now offering a new DIT Pack, a product bundle that includes Assimilate's Scratch and Live Looks for live grading single- and multi-camera setups. The DIT Pack is ideal for production workflows that require extensive previs on-set and those looking to streamline post workflows after the shoot.
With the pack, it combines live grading with dailies transcoding, and through livestreaming, it can send everything out to remote and studio clients, while capturing all camera metadata used in post pipelines.
Essentially, the DIT Pack is Assimilate Scratch and Live Looks bundled together, but it's aggressively cheaper than buying each program separately.
Let's break down how it works, according to Assimilate.
Camera to Post Workflow—Capture All and Pass It On
The workflow starts with Live Looks for live grading content from any number of cameras in realtime and even adding advanced effects like green-screen background replacement and texture effects.
Each time when saving a grade, all the metadata, either input by the user or delivered via the live SDI signal from all cameras, will also be saved in the form of a readable text doc and an XML for pipeline scripting in post. All grades and metadata are stored in an easy-to-approach folder structure that can simply be delivered to VFX/post.
Credit: Assimilate
Integrated Off-line Edit Workflow Through Dailies
In Scratch, all camera material is loaded, and the looks and metadata are matched and merged from the Live Looks folder structure, along with automated syncing of audio. All these tasks are automated and require almost no user interaction. Scratch will output in many formats as required by VFX/post:
- Off-line DNX or Apple ProRes material, including all metadata for offline editing
- High-quality EXR VFX plates, including frame-based lens information and camera metadata
- Lightweight h264/h265 rushes for online review
With Scratch, it allows the user to either consolidate all look and metadata files into a folder per day or copy the look and metadata next to each source media file. This makes it easier to link DI software.
Producers and post supervisors can then receive an extensive clip report, listing all relevant production information, and assistant editors are provided with an ALE that contains all clip metadata, including dynamic CDL information, to use in the target NLE.
Extensive Remote Review and Streaming Capabilities Throughout the Entire Workflow
At the live grading stage, Live Looks provides a local web interface for clients on or near set to browse grades, before-and-after snapshots, and metadata via wifi during the shoot. At the same time, Live Looks allows streaming of all camera feeds through either an RTMP stream or via NDI directly into Zoom, Skype, SetStream.io, or any other NDI-compatible software.
At the dailies stage, Scratch separately outputs through RTMP and NDI for in-depth remote QC of all footage. After transcoding, Scratch allows for automatically publishing footage to the Assimilate Dailies Online web portal or the COPRA dailies platform via direct script integration.
The intuitive workflow allows productions to provide post with all footage, transcodes, grades, and metadata from the shoot. If you're an existing user of Scratch or Live Look, Assimilate has an upgrade program to the DIT Pack.
The DIT Pack is available for macOS or Windows at $1,399 for a permanent license, $799.00 annually, or $99.00 monthly.
You can download it at Assimilate's website.
