Version 9.4 of our product suite!

As you know, we've been hard at work, developing Live FX this year. However, we also had quite some huge projects to get done for all of our other products. Plenty of under-the-hood stuff, like optimizing for Apple's M1 chips, updating our SDI-implementation and of course keeping up with all file formats and cameras that have been introduced this year! But see below what's new & great with our products and know that we have a packed roadmap for Q1 2022 already!

Oh, and don't forget to check our end-of-year promotion saving up to 50% on permanent licenses at the very bottom of this email!

And with that, we wish you a relaxing and peaceful time with your loved ones.
We're thankful for all the feature requests, bug reports, congratulations and first and foremost: Having you as our user, holding up the flag! We can't wait to talk about all the amazing things we have planned for 2022 - equally for virtual production as for traditional finishing, as we're planning to push the boundaries of color grading further than ever before.
We'll be there for you during the holidays with little downtimes around Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. You can reach us anytime under support@assimilateinc.com.

We'll be back with full force in 2022 - see you on the other side!

Cheers!
The Assimilate Team


What's new in SCRATCH 9.4?

Editor Update

We have updated our editor with better editing modes and tools. We now have a select tool, a trim tool and a razor tool. Also drag & drop behavior has been improved, so now it behaves much smoother and especially small tweaking of edits is much easier and faster than before. No worries, we're not going to compete with Adobe or Avid, but we wanted finishing to become more straight forward. While this update seems like a small thing - it really was quite a project ;-) .


Apple M1 Compatibility

Again one of the things that might look like an easy task - but this was one of the bigger projects in 2021. While the SCRATCH codebase luckily was flexible enough to be ported over fairly fast, we also were dependent on SDKs from third party vendors to be ported to M1. 9.4 will be the first SCRATCH version to run natively on Apple M1 and also make use of hardware accelerated de- and encoding of specific formats - first and foremost ProRes and of course ProRes RAW.

Color Wheels Update

Many of our users wished for a better way to see at a glance in which direction a specific color wheel has been moved. In 9.4, the balls will get tinted in the color they have been pushed towards. This is even visible with very small movements from the center. Of course, the color tint will be less saturated with the 'Dim' option enabled, to not be too distractive. Like so often, it's the small things in life ;-) .


OCIO v2 & ACES 1.3

Of course we did not forget to go with the times and update our OCIO and ACES implementations to the latest versions. This will help colorists stay up to date and deliver from ACES in the latest HDR flavors, as well as VFX-houses to better integrate SCRATCH into their image pipelines with OCIO v2.

Auto Audio Channel Export

This is a long standing feature request from our DIT users: Have SCRATCH export the same number of audio channels than the source clips, instead of all channels of the timeline. Well, it finally happened! Enabling the Auto option will disable the individual track selectors and SCRATCH will export the respective number of audio channels per clip for DNx MXF, h264/h265 and ProRes!


(Un-)Distort Plugin

While we developed this Plugin mainly for Live FX, it also has great use for traditional finishing: It can load UV maps and this way deal with lens distortion for simple undistort - comp - distort setups.

Qualifier Update

Not that our keyers were in need of too big of an update... but we thought we'd throw one in nonetheless ;-) . All keyers in SCRATCH now have a denoise option, as well as clip black/white options. And by popular demand: The range of the Expand parameter has been extended!


Improved Consolidate

Our users on-set have requested additional checksum types for quite a while in order to use SCRATCH for offload & backup. Here we present you SHA1 and xxHash64 as additional checksum types for Timeline Consolidate. To use it, import footage straight from the media cards, and from the Tools menu on the Construct Tab, start the Timeline Consolidate to offload to multiple destinations!


What's new in Play Pro 9.4?

Production Metadata

You can now enter production metadata into the project tree inside Play Pro, which will then be used for various reports, exported from Play Pro. This is highly useful for quick review sessions on-set, as well as in post!


Paste menu

Changing a setting or grade in Play Pro and applying it to multiple clips down the timeline has always been a manual task.... until now! We've added the paste menu, known from full SCRATCH, into Play Pro so now users can not only select which parameters to paste, but they can also paste forward to apply it to all clips on the timeline. Pro-tip: If you set an out-point on your mini timeline, paste forward will only paste to the clips within the range ;-) .


What's new in Live Assist & Live Looks 9.4?

Brompton Tessera Support

With virtual production all around, Brompton Technology has become one of the most prominent providers of LED wall technology. As of v9.4, both Live Looks and Live Assist can now use a Tessera image processor to be used as a LUT box and live-grade the image going through onto the LED wall. Volume grading made easy!


IS-mini 4K & Teradek Bolt 4K

V9.4 ships with full support, incl. image capture, for the TVLogic IS-mini 4K LUT box.

On top of that we added support for auto-recording the live SDI signal with Teradek Bolt 4K in Live Assist, which wasn't possible up until now.

These were just the bigger features introduced with v9.4 - but there is a TON of nifty little things added along the way! Click the button below and check out the full release notes - it's definitely worth it, as we're sure you'll find a few gems in there ;-) .