THX Ltd. Acquires Cinespace Color Management Suite From Cine-Tal Systems

De Facto Standard System for Post-Production Color Management Furthers THX Mission to Drive Consistency of the Artist Vision from Content Creation to Post-Production to Playback

THX Ltd. today announced the acquisition of the cineSpace™ Color Management Suite from privately-held Cine-tal Systems, a developer of image monitoring and color management solutions. cineSpace is the de facto standard in film and television post-production for achieving image color accuracy and consistency. The acquisition complements technologies and services THX has been delivering to post-production professionals for more than 25-years and furthers the company’s mission of ensuring quality entertainment is delivered true to the artist’s intent.

cineSpace is used in the world of digital intermediates, visual effects, broadcast, animation and games, to produce and render near-perfect representations of how an image will appear in its final form, from the wide array of digital formats to film. With specific requirements from creative artists about the way color is displayed, color matching has become a lengthy, iterative cycle in post-production. cineSpace cuts down on these cycles by removing the guesswork when dealing with film images and producing accurate image representations which can be viewed and manipulated on a digital workstation monitor or projector. This translates into a potential savings of thousands of dollars and countless hours on a project.

“From the forest of Endor in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi to the rainforests of Pandora in Avatar, picture and sound are critically important to creating the art form directors are envisioning when telling their story,” said Rick Dean, senior vice president at THX Ltd. “The key to delivering on this artistic vision is to provide the post-production community with powerful tools that enable them to accurately profile and match colors to the intended reference palate, from cinema to the home. THX, through our work delivering best practices, Certification and technologies, has always been about preserving the artistic vision and the emotional impact brought forth by image and sound. We look forward to supporting the cineSpace community and further developing this technology.”

THX looks forward to continuing to support current cineSpace customers as well as expanding the reach of cineSpace to new customers. THX plans to deliver regular updates to the technology to ensure customers have access to technical enhancements. cineSpace becomes a “THX technology,” joining a portfolio that includes THX Media Director™. From content creation through to playback, THX is committed to developing technologies and providing certification services that ensures entertainment is delivered as intended by the artist.

“THX is the right company to extend the reach and adoption of cineSpace into the post-production space,” said Robert Carroll, CEO at Cine-Tal. “It brings years of engineering and industry know-how in the color management space and the global reach of the company will ensure that more colorists in the post-production space will have access to our software. We’re excited for THX and for the next phase of cineSpace and wish the company the best of success.”

The cineSpace suite comprises several applications that work together to bring consistency to workflows: cineProfiler™, equalEyes™, cinePlugins™ and cineCube Visual™. Packaged with cineSpace™ is a set of standard target profiles, including a range of video standards and a selection of film stock samples.