Skip to content
Disguise User Guide

CDL

Overview

The ASC-CDL, more commonly expressed and known simply as the CDL, was created through a joint operation between the American Society of Cinematographers’ Technology Committee, production / post production vendors, and colour scientists to standardize the exchange of primary colour adjustments. The specification was first released in 2007 and is now widely adopted among several software and hardware manufacturers.

The CDL stands for Colour Decision List. Just like how an EDL communicates basic edit data, a CDL carries a subset of colour-correction data.

Although all colour-correction systems offer their own basic grading controls, Lift, Gain, and Gamma are implemented differently from vendor to vendor. Their definitions of LGG can vary in sensitivity and response. The strength of a CDL- based workflow is its software-agnostic nature. CDL compliant hardware and software can create, modify, and reproduce consistent colour results exported from any other supported platform. In other words, it’s all about the perfect interchange of colour modifications.

The parameters of a CDL replace the traditional Lift, Gamma, and Gain you’re probably used to manipulating. However, each set of CDL controls behave very differently from one another

  • Slope is to Gain
  • Offset is to Lift
  • Power is to Gamma

Workflows

All these workflows should be performed with the colour management option in the project setting set to ACES or OCIO.

 LUT workflow

Previously pre- and post-transform were set on the layer editor. Now the fields exist on the LUT object instead.

CDL workflows

  1. Create a CDL layer:
  2. Either create a CDL object, or add a .cc .ccc or .cdl file to the LutFiles folder in the project directory.
  3. Select your CDL in the layer.
  4. See that layers arrowed into the CDL layer have an effect applied.
  5. Adjust the scale, offset, power and saturation parameters on the CDL object and see that the image outputted changes.

Blackmagic Gen5 CDL Workflow

  1. Acquire footage from a Blackmagic camera recorded with Gen5 colour.
  2. Place the footage in a d3 project in a format d3 can read.
  3. Open the VideoClip editor for the footage.
  4. Change the input transform to Blackmagic Gen5.
  5. See that the footage displays correctly when mapped to a display.

Linear exposure and gamma controls on video layer

  1. Create a video layer.
  2. Set a video clip.
  3. Adjust the exposure and gamma fields on the video layer and see that they have effect.
  4. Adjust the exposure and gamma fields on the videoclip editor and see that they have cumulative effect with those on the layer.

RGBColour layer IDT

  1. Create an RGBColour layer
  2. See that there is an input transform field.
  3. Set a value for the colour on the layer.
  4. Change the IDT and see that the colour changes.

Non-stylised primaries and transforms

  1. Create a video layer.
  2. Set a video clip.
  3. Open the video clip editor and find the input transform.
  4. Set the input transform to one of the options under Utility. See that both a transform and a colour space can be set + mixed and matched.
  5. Create an LED screen and open the editor.
  6. Find the output transform.
  7. Set the output transform to one of the options under Utility.

See as above. N.B. with the colour insider changes, output transforms no longer affect the stage visualiser.