The company that brought us lutify.me has launched a new online AI-powered colour grading platform called fylm.ai. It’s a web-based colour grading solution that’s completely platform-independent and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux from within your web browser. There’s nothing to download or install, no plugins and you’re always seeing the latest version of the app.
It works for both stills and video and as well as providing all of the colour grading features you might already be used to, it offers colour matching and extraction, print film emulation and tools to let you share and collaborate in teams remotely. According to their website, it’s already in use by companies such as Netflix, Prime Video and the BBC.
Fylm has a YouTube channel, but other than the introduction video above, there’s no content showing you how it actually works or how to use the platform, but the interface appears pretty straightforward for anybody who’s used something like Lightroom to grade images before. Even for video editors, while it’s not got quite the same look as something like DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro, it seems quite intuitive. There’s also a fairly decent Getting started section on the Fylm website.
One of the cool features of Fylm is the AI Color Extract Tool, which allows you to extract a colour create with just a single click and create a 3D LUT file from it that you can then use to grade all your other clips – at least, the ones you want to match to it. Fylm claims that the process has been trained on “millions of cinematic frames”, although it’s relative. When you consider that there are 24 frames per second and around 5400 seconds in a 90-minute movie – which equates to approximately 129,600 frames – “millions” doesn’t seem as massive as it could be.
But, they might’ve trained it from “millions” of frames from 2 minute segments of a bunch of movies, too. They don’t clarify. Still, the theory of the feature does sound pretty cool and the example shown on the website does look quite good. It’s something I’m definitely going to have to have a play with at some point to see just how well it performs.
As well as the AI colour extraction, you’ve also got colour matching, to help match different shots or even different cameras to each other so you get a nice consistent look throughout them all. They even say it’ll let you match digital video to footage shot on film. Of course, exactly how close something like this will match is going to depend on the output format you generate. 12-Bit Blackmagic RAW, ProRes RAW or some other high bit depth format is obviously going to give better results than 8-bit h.264.
Like the AI Color Extract feature, you can also create a LUT from the colour matching process, too, allowing you to reuse the LUT in the future for more footage you need to shoot and match from multiple cameras you might use together regularly. Naturally, you get all of the usual grading tools as well with curves, colour wheels, RGB parade, waveform, vectorscope, etc.
As it’s an online solution, you’re going to have to upload your content to the website in order to be able to actually do anything with it. For photographers, this won’t be that big of a deal, uploading maybe a gig or two of images at a time, but for video shooters where even a 10-minute YouTube video can easily reach 15-20GB or more, if you have a lot of clips from a bunch of different cameras, that’s quite the wait uploading stuff when you want to grade your stuff and this service does not come free.
Of course, you can just upload small cut down clips to perform the actual grade, export LUT files and then apply them locally in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro or whatever editing application you’re using. And on the bright side, once you have done the uploading wait, grading should perform much more quickly as you’ve got their cloud processing power to rely on instead of just your local computer.
It’s Software as a Service, with a monthly subscription fee and nothing to download or install as it all runs through your browser. There is a free account to get you started so you can check the place out which allows for a single user with 3 projects and up to 1GB of cloud storage. If you want more than that, you can go up to $16/mo for unlimited projects, unlimited LUT creation basic collaboration and 50GB of storage. But that 50GB can still fill up pretty quickly for video use if you’ve got several projects on the go and can’t delete and clean out regularly.
For anything more than that, you’re looking at a Team or Enterprise package which is either $44/mo or a custom quote depending on your exact needs respectively. You can see the full comparison here.
You can find out more and check out their free account over on Fylm.ai.
Would you use an online grading app or do you prefer to do it locally?
[via PetaPixel]
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