At the Autodesk booth a short while ago, I ran into David Cole, the award-winning supervising colorist on King Kong. David was at the booth to test out the new, custom-designed hardware panel for the Discreet Lustre digital color-grading system, which Autodesk is showing at NAB, and hopes to offer to the marketplace before the end of the year. He was also visiting Vegas fresh off his arrival in Los Angeles from Down Under, after taking a gig as senior DI colorist at Laser Pacific, Hollywood.

David is currently working on a couple of modest-budget features at Laser, but insists the time for that company to land a DI gig on, in my words, “a major, blowout, big-time, studio effects film,” is not far off for the facility known as a legendary video mastering house for TV. Making Laser Pacific a major DI player, David concedes, was a major reason he left his comfy life in New Zealand for Hollywood.

“I would be disappointed if anything less happened,” he says. “It’s pretty exciting what we have going on at Laser Pacific.”

As an interesting side note, Autodesk officials informed me that, by far, the biggest market for Lustre seats at facilities large and small in recent months has been in India and throughout Asia. In our self-absorbed universe, the notion that major effects and DI work might be happening somewhere other than LA, NY, and possibly London is hard to deal with. But obviously, Lustre action is happening right now on a global basis.