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# 3D LUTs

3D LUTs are used for advanced film colour management in Smoke and provide a superior alternative to 1D LUTs. 3D LUTs are primarily used for display purposes and are the most accurate means of displaying logarithmic film scans on a graphics monitor. Since 3D LUTs often set up the proper display environment for your film clips, they are only applied to the Player or one or more viewers, rather than the entire monitor.

3D LUTs are always created outside of Smoke, and they are uneditable once imported. Instead, you can work with outside hardware and software, such as the Kodak™ Display Management system, to generate a 3D LUT for your needs. While there are generic 3D LUTs that are interchangeable between different systems, these generally provide less accurate results since they can only approximate the current viewing conditions.

3D LUTs place higher processing demands on your system than 1D LUTs. As such, interaction speed can slow down. To offset these demands and view clips in real time, you can process them with the 3D LUT.

If you are outputting footage destined for film, but require an intermediate video version, you can also process clips with 3D LUTs. You can process the footage with a 3D LUT, committing the log-to-lin data conversion to a video clip that will be viewed at another location. While this process produces footage with the closest accuracy to film look, its accuracy cannot match how the clip appears on your calibrated Smoke system. You cannot use a 3D LUT to convert linear data back to log data.

Clips are processed with 3D LUTs on the EditDesk using the LUT Editor accessible from the Film Tools menu.

When a compatible graphics card is installed in your workstation, Smoke supports GPU-accelerated 3D LUT display, resulting in improved processing performance, such as real-time playback using 3D LUTs.