Back The spinoff Lucid Technologies is developing a program to enhance film images automatically

The spinoff Lucid Technologies is developing a program to enhance film images automatically

The company, created on the 11th of this month, is to market computer products that will save audiovisual productions time and money

11.01.2021

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Lucid Technologies, a new UPF spinoff, is to bring to the audiovisual market computer products that will streamline the film postproduction process, automatically improving films’ aesthetic appearance. Thus, the company will exploit cutting-edge technologies protected by two international patents developed by the Image Processing for Enhanced Cinematography (IP4EC) research group of the UPF Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC).

The company’s first product is a computer program that will help film professionals to perform an essential task more quickly and easily in any post-production process of a film. This stage, called technical grade, consists of reviewing the entire recording and fixing whatever is necessary so that the images have a natural appearance to the audience’s eyes in terms of lighting, colour and contrast. This process requires many hours of work by specialized professionals.

The company’s first product is a computer program that will help film professionals to perform an essential task called technical grade more quickly and easily in any post-production process of a film.

There is currently no tool on the market to complete the entire technical grade process automatically, which is the gap that Lucid Technologies aims to fill with its software. What advantages will this new technology have? “It will enable achieving natural-looking images and simultaneously save time and money while freeing professional editors from a laborious process, so they can devote themselves to more creative tasks”, says Marcelo Bertalmío, principal investigator of the IP4EC group and scientific director of the spinoff.

The program is adapted to the new generation of high dynamic range (HDR) screens. This technology has become popular in recent years and offers higher quality images because the contrast is greater than in conventional displays, with darker blacks, brighter whites and more vivid colours.

Moreover, Lucid Technologies is developing technology to facilitate the review of images during recording, before editing. The monitoring tools used on the film set do not emulate visual perception well enough and the company intends to create a product that allows film professionals to view an accurate representation of how the film will look after technical grading. “Thus, film cinematographers will be able to control more quickly and accurately the look of the images and materialize their ideas in films more faithfully”, Bertalmío summarizes.

The company, which will be bringing these products to market during the first half of 2021, was incorporated on 11 January with the signing of the deeds of incorporation by the UPF general manager, Jaume Badia, and the founding partners, Marcelo Bertalmío, Gino Bollaert, Tobias Webster, Jordi Joaquim Recort, and Bart Huisken.

UPF has supported the creation of the company in view of its commitment to transfer knowledge and technology to society. It has done so via its transfer office, the Innovation Unit - UPF Business Shuttle, and the innovation management company UPF Ventures, driven and participated in by the University itself.

“A gap in the market”

“We decided to set up the company because we saw that the technologies that were being developed by our group were producing better results than the state of the art and we found that the market has a major gap that we could fill”, Bertalmío explains.

The promoters of Lucid Technologies will begin creating products aimed at the film industry because it has the highest quality standards, but its next goal is to apply this knowledge to other industries such as video games, virtual reality devices and screens for mobile phones and televisions.

The UPF researchers have managed to develop their project thanks to a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, which allowed setting up the IP4EC research group in 2012, and two Proof of Concept grants, also from the ERC.

The scientists also developed the technologies they are now going to use in the company thanks to funding obtained at the 2018 edition of the UPF INNOValora programme, which supports proofs of concept related to applied research at UPF and is co-funded by the Generalitat (Government) of Catalonia and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Also, the project has received a grant from the 2019 innovators programme, promoted by the Generalitat (Government) of Catalonia and co-funded by the European Union through the ERDF. With the support of this programme, the project has hired an entrepreneur who has carried out the market study and drawn up its business plan.

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