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April 2012

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Bits & Pieces M Promoting Showtime's House of Lies UMBAI, INDIA — Hello Robot (www.hellorobot.tv), headquar- tered in Mumbai, with satellite production offices in New Delhi and Dallas, delivered a largely in-camera solution for a sophisticated promo that captured the stars of Showtime's new hit House of Lies in frozen moment vignettes. Amit Gupta, co-founder of Hello Robot, helped conceive the promo, directed the LA He shot the stars individually, against black backgrounds, in their set pieces with DP Ray Peshke and camera operator Chris Bottoms circling them with a dolly-mounted Red Epic camera shooting at 50fps. Some of the VFX — including a tiny pill — were props rigged on set by Hollywood's West FX. "Anything that had human interaction had to be held or rigged," Gupta explains. "Some of the props closest to camera had to be rigged as well, since the illusion would be given away if it was all built in 3D. " He also shot a number of props against blue from multiple perspectives to capture textures to map onto the flurry of cards, papers and pills that were replicated in CGI. Hello Robot's Mumbai office handled the 3D anima- tion, pulling textures from Gupta's live-action shoot shoot and guided it through an international VFX and post process over the course of a two-month period. The promo shows cast members Don Cheadle, Kristen Bell, Dawn Olivieri, Ben Schwartz and Josh Lawson fro- zen in time as paper money flies through the air, pills spill from a bottle, phone messages flutter to the ground and playing cards hover in space. The camera encircles them in their environments giving viewers a 360-degree perspective of their lives as big fish in a big business pond. "The promo's VFX were a huge chal- lenge," says Gupta. "Flat VFX are one thing, but VFX in a 360-degree world where they are blended with the live environment is something else." into Autodesk Maya for compositing. The Dallas office performed wire and rig remov- als, painting and compositing with Adobe After Effects and Eyeon Fusion. The final full-cast sequence was also com- posited from individual shots of the stars, which were rehearsed with stand-ins as placeholders for their colleagues. The House of Lies promo not only turned the heads of TV viewers it literally stopped traffic in New York City's Times Square where it was displayed on a giant screen. "Many of us are automatically thinking 'digital and 3D' these days when live-action, in- camera effects can still be a very good solu- tion," Gupta points out. By Christine Bunish at a glance SHURE (www.shure.com) will be showing its new VP89 shotgun condenser microphone at this year's NAB show in Las Vegas. The VP98 is designed to ease field shoots via interchangeable long, medium and short capsules, making it suitable for many situations. CINTEL INTERNATIONAL (www.cintel.co.uk) will launch a new 6K imaging sensor for the Ditto Evolution film scanner at NAB. The new version provides over-sampled 4K data files, as well as new timeline interface options and extended vertical range options for the ImageMill2 realtime data processing engine. The Ditto scans both 16mm and 35mm film with 2K speeds at up to 11fps. MATTHEWS STUDIO EQUIPMENT (www.msegrip.com), a distributor of all FloatCam products, will introduce a new member of the FloatCam DC-Slider family. The HD-DC Slider is designed to support heavier cameras, such as Arri's Alexa. The existing FloatCam DC-Slider supports a range of cameras up to a maximum weight of 22lbs. The new HD-DC Slider features a rail length of 73 inches, tracking length of 63 inches, vertical height of 79 inches and a maxi- mum load of 70lbs, with a rail and fulcrum weight of 50lbs. XENDATA (www.xendata.com), a provider of digital video archive solutions for the media and entertainment industry, is showing a new range of SX-500 archive servers at NAB. The SX-500 is designed for archiving video assets to high-capacity LTO-5 robotic tape libraries and RAID. Digital video archives based on XenData's SX-500 Series Servers can scale to manage over 100TB of RAID, multiple Petabytes of near-line LTO storage and an unlimited capacity of offline LTO-5 data tapes. The com- pany is offering three models, and the solutions are configurable to manage a wide range of LTO tape libraries, including those from Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Oracle/Storagetek, Overland Storage, Qualstar, Quantum, Sony, Spectra Logic and Tandberg. SOLID STATE LOGIC (www.solid-state-logic.com) will have its broadcast demo vehicle at its NAB booth this year. The truck is an HD audio production facility outfitted with an SSL C10 HD console, a range of SSL broadcast I/O, and technologies from partners such as Genelec, Miranda and RTS. SSL plans to tour the US with the vehicle over the next three years. The booth will also have demo areas for its C100 HDS and C10 HD consoles, as well as its Integra- tion I/O Range and the Nucleus DAW controller/audio interface. www.keyframe.ca 6 Post • April 2012 www.postmagazine.com

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