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Colour image coding is at the heart of digital imaging; it is a critical element of high-quality digital cinema and HD production. In this course we follow colour from its spectral form in front of the camera into acquisition where colour is reduced to 3 components, then through the post-production, grading, finishing, approval, mastering, distribution, and display/exhibition stages. We discuss the colour transforms and colourspaces used at all of these stages. We discuss colour aspects of subsampling and compression (H.264, as in Canon cameras, ProRes, as in Alexa, and JPEG2000, as used in DCPs).

For nearly 20 years, cinema production and post-production has been based upon the conceptual model of film acquisition: Even if digitally acquired, imagery was typically processed using the Cineon/DPX model technically, Cineon Printing Density (CPD) coding. That coding incorporates the technical parameters of film; in particular, the S-shaped tone response and the colour crosstalk of film are built-into the image encoding. Because CGI and VFX computations are best performed in linear-light, the CPD scheme has made CGI and VFX difficult.