City studio pushes cinematic immersiveness to the next grade

If you were to watch the remastered editions of Steven Spielberg’s ‘ET’ or ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ in an HDR-ready theatre today, chances are you might end up squinting while viewing sequences depicting the arrival of the extra-terrestrial motherships on planet Earth, shielding your eyes from the blinding spotlights emanating from the fuselages.

For Gen Z arrivals, the nearest equivalent might be the ‘daybreak on Earth as seen from outer space’ sequence from Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Gravity’. Among those pushing the envelope of cinematic immersiveness via post-production, is city-based Prasad Film Labs, which recently joined hands with Barco, a technology company headquartered in Kortrijk, Belgium. The two companies have together launched India’s, and Asia’s first, and the world’s largest ‘HDR by Barco’ colour grading facility at Prasad’s Chennai studio.

What does the Barco collaboration mean for the filmgoing experience? Abhishek Prasad Akkeneni, CTO – Prasad Corporation (P) Ltd, began by speaking about the company’s journey in the colour grading space. “We were among the first adopters of the Digital Intermediate (DI or colour grading) technology in India. One of the first films we worked on while employing DI was the Bollywood blockbuster ‘Khakee’. The process of colour grading is the last part of post production, and it employs some of the most highly-trained professionals in the industry. These are technicians with a deep understanding of colour science and film grammar,” he tells us.

Prasad’s grading suite is equipped with Barco’s HDR Lightsteering technology toolkit, including its proprietary HDR Lightbox and LS4K-P HDR Lightsteering projector. The suite features a large 51-foot screen and the country’s longest throw-distance in a DI suite. It enables colourists to work in a theatrical, larger-than-life setting, as opposed to performing colour correction and mastering for cinema and OTT deliverables on conventional large-format HD screens.

In India, close to 1,500 films are churned out every year. So, post production is big business. And the work that goes into the ‘post’ of tentpole films starring A-listers is staggering.

“Some of the biggest features of the year, such as Mani Ratnam’s ‘Thug Life’, take nothing less than 300 hours for colour grading. Between Prasad’s three post production suites in Chennai, Mumbai and Hyderabad, we work on anywhere between 30 and 40 features a month,” says Akkeneni. The grading for HDR for two major releases has already begun at the Prasad facility here.

Colour grading might be only the tip of the iceberg, as Barco had made another major announcement earlier in May. The company inked a multi-year agreement with

Chennai-based Qube Cinema, to deploy HDR by Barco in premium multiplexes across India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Moviegoers in these markets can expect at least 10 new HDR-ready theatres per year in the coming years, with all locations in the deal deployed by 2030.


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