The ZHiCK pipeline: a guided tour
From ingest to delivery, a walkthrough of the six-stage pipeline that powers every frame we ship — and the design decisions that keep it reversible.
Six stages, one space
The ZHiCK pipeline has six stages: Ingest, AI Layering, Inference, Composite, Preview, and Delivery. Each stage operates in the same 32-bit linear float colour space. No stage bakes in a curve, applies a gamma, or clips a value. The frame that enters the pipeline is the frame that leaves it, transformed but never destroyed.
1. Ingest & Linearization
Every source — whether a camera RAW, a DPX sequence, or a ProRes proxy — is decoded into a 32-bit linear float working space. This is the foundation. If the ingest is wrong, everything downstream is wrong.
We log the full colour science of the source: the camera, the colour space, the transfer function, any LUTs that were applied. This manifest travels with the frame through the entire pipeline.
2. AI Layering
EvoLight and ZHiCKROTO decompose the frame into relightable, roto-clean layers. The frame is no longer a flat image — it is a stack: geometry, mattes, albedo, roughness. Each layer can be manipulated independently.
3. Inference & Synthesis
Custom diffusion and transformer models run on our GPU farm. This is where relighting, extension, and restoration happen — frame-accurate, at resolution.
4. Composite & Look
Artists composite in a real linear float node graph. Light interacts the way physics says it should because the space is honest. The look is built here, not baked earlier.
5. Real-time Preview
The viewport grades at 32-bit. What you see is what renders. No guessing, no "it will look different in the final." The preview is the final, at lower resolution.
6. Delivery & Archive
Output as EXR, DPX, or ProRes — each tagged with the full colour science manifest. The delivery is reversible: any frame can be traced back to its source through the manifest. Nothing is lost.
Why it is reversible
Reversibility is a design principle, not a feature. Every transform is logged. Every layer is preserved. The pipeline never destroys information — it only adds metadata. That means a regrade is not a re-render; it is a new branch from an existing node graph. And a delivery mistake is not a disaster; it is a re-export.
This is the pipeline we have built over eight years. It is not the simplest pipeline, but it is the most honest one we know how to build.
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