Digital Vision congratulates Pixar as Toy Story 3 goes to infinity and beyond

The entire team at Digital Vision sends hearty congratulations to our colleagues at Pixar Animation Studios on the far-reaching success of their blockbuster hit, Toy Story 3.  Digital Vision is honored to have played a role in bringing Toy Story 3’s images to life in this tour de force of storytelling, state-of-the-art imagery, and world-class talent. Toy Story 3 and the Pixar team utilized Digital Vision’s Nucoda Film Master as an integral part of their innovative pipeline developed exclusively to support projects completed at their in-house facility.

Late last year, as Pixar considered how to modify their internal workflow into a truly nonlinear, cutting-edge pipeline, the Emeryville, CA based company met with Digital Vision experts to determine how to best incorporate color grading into the vast deliverables demanded by today’s multi-tiered marketplace.  Pixar saw the Nucoda Film Master as a critical piece of their emerging pipeline and subsequently purchased two units.   In addition to the Nucoda Film Master’s powerful color tools, the systems proved to be foundational to the studio’s ground-breaking move to a 16-bit half-float, nondestructive pipeline.

As the industry moves further away from a film-centric pipeline towards a robust data workflow that supports a vast array of deliverables, Digital Vision is keeping ahead of the curve. For computer generated content, especially animation, a 10-bit pipeline cannot handle the process and retain the intended quality envisioned by the creators. Pixar needed a color workflow with true HDR support using 16-bit half-float OpenEXR’s, real-time playback of 16-bit half-float files, and a tool that allowed rendering and previewing without premature loss of quality.    The Nucoda Film Master supports all of those needs and allows previews of all deliverables in grading context while grading in OpenEXR native format.  Pixar wrote their own plug-ins in the standard OpenFX format to ensure the preview mechanism exactly matched the market standards. The Film Master also enables the colorist to see final deliverables in every iteration; including Digital Cinema and film output for PAL or DVD delivery.

Digital Vision’s accomplishments are critical to enabling the changing ways that companies are working to ensure their content is delivered at the pinnacle of quality. Digital Vision is proud to be in partnership with the most creative companies in the industry.  For more information on Pixar, click here.