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February 2011

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3D STEREOSCOPIC [ cont. from 19 ] (www.worldsaway.tv), says his company “jumped into the deep end of the pool” with its autostereoscopic (glasses-free stereo 3D) project for the world launch of the Lexus CT 200h. Featuring eight views, the all-CG intro to the vehicle, displayed in a kiosk at public venues worldwide, had Lee dealing with eight streams of images instead of stereo 3D’s two. “Currently, the eight-view autostereoscopic tech- nology is great for digital-signage applications,” he notes. “It’s great for venues where you want to make an impact and capture viewers in a transient audience environment.”The Manhattan showcase for the Lexus video was High Line Park downtown. The project came to Worlds Away via Alioscopy, makers of the glasses-free 3D display. Lee teamed with AMCI agency creatives to co-direct the video, which has a “change your landscape” theme. It inte- grates a photoreal CG Lexus CT 200h with flying 3D type and a real human hand that drops CG models of iconic structures — the Sydney Opera House, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, a pagoda, Seat- tle’s Space Needle — around the car, building a unique, international landscape. Worlds Away pared down extremely-detailed CG models of the vehicle supplied by Lexus and sourced architectural models from TurboSquid. Lee used Au- todesk 3DS Max as his primary tool, tapping Au- todesk’s Combustion 2008 (“an old program, but I know it so well because I used to train people on it”) for compositing and motion blur. “Combustion spit out eight views of each shot, which we put through Mix8, Alioscopy’s proprietary software for interlacing eight views into one,” Lee ex- plains. After it yielded one sequence for each shot, he conformed the video in After Effects to produce the uncompressed AVI required for playback. With an autostereoscopic project the “cinematic vocabulary most artists are accustomed to” flies out the window.“You have to rethink how you want shots to flow,” he says.“Sometimes the traditional way to do something won’t work for autostereo and you have to use forced-perspective tricks.” As to pop-out effects, Lee gave all the typography off-the-screen dimensionality and provided the vehi- cle with subtle 3D effects, such as popping out the tip of a bumper. But the hand, featured building the re- markable CG landscape, remained a 2D element. “Doing a real-world project like this helps you speak to future clients and give them better ball- park estimates of what they’re in for in terms of costs and time,” Lee notes.“The more you do it, the more you can give absolutes, which is really impor- tant to clients.” [ cont. from 24 ] COMMERCIAL WORKFLOWS Keeping the white from clipping can be challenging, says Scarpulla, so “it’s an advantage of Scratch to be able to go into the metadata and knock down the ISO to get a little more detail in the whites to work with. It’s all realtime.” Scarpulla feels there may be some misconceptions about Scratch’s color correction capabilities, simply because some of the system’s users are not long-time colorists.“The color correction tools are every bit as powerful — if not more so — when one approaches them with a colorist background,” he notes.“To me it’s up there in the top tier of all the other players. It’s about who is sitting behind it.” The 4K footage provides additional advantages during the finishing process. Scarpulla says numerous blow-ups were performed in the edit of the Liberty Medical job, but when it came to the online, those blow-ups were actually reductions when culled from the original and much larger 4K files.“I had to pull the frame back to match their blow ups! We took medium shots and turned them into close ups with zero loss of quality.” As for final delivery, Scarpulla says, typically, it’s going to be file-based. “I prefer either raw QuickTime or a DPX sequence,” he notes.“We also cater to the client’s needs, which can sometimes be ProRes HQ or Avid DNxHD, which are all worthy finishing formats.A lot of times, when you are dealing with the likes of HBO or MTV, they prefer HDCAM SR tape or D-5, and we have a full complement of VTRs here.” GREEN DA YS [ cont. from 28 ] companies because we have this dual life where we are music publishers on one hand and run this environmental non-profit on the other.” Wood and his wife Patty started Port Washington, NY-based Omnimusic (www.omnimusic.com) in their living room with a drum set and a piano, and it grew from there.“We always ran the thing together. Our kids were always at the office; when people have kids that’s where the awareness begins to grow about what’s in the environment and how it might af- fect them.” The use of pesticides on school playing fields got the Woods moving toward environmental issues, and things just took off from there. “At the same time Patty was investigating the environmental thing, I was working as an activist in the music business,” explains Wood. “I got involved with the ASCAP board of di- rectors, really trying to improve the lives composers and people who write music for media because at that time it was an unappreciated part of the music business; we weren’t really getting our fair share of royalties. So Patty and I both took activist tracks. Me music; her the environment.” While Grassroots officially debuted in 2000, Omn- imusic had always been concerned about running their company in a socially-responsible way, packing their records and then CDs in recycled materials whenever possible. They have also banned plastic packing peanuts and instead use packing peanuts made of cornstarch.“You can eat if them if you had to,” says Wood, adding that they are completely biodegradable.“We use safe cleaning products and encourage our staff to eat healthy, including banning diet soda from our office — the chemicals in it are not really good for anybody.” Wood reports that initially new employees “think we are a little nuts,” but after a few months, they get a thirst to find out more. Grassroots focuses on educating the public about toxins in the environment and how they affect people’s health.“In many cases, technology has outpaced scien- tific knowledge,” he explains.“We have a marketplace full of products that claim to make your life easier, and they might, but it’s what else they do that concerns us.” Wood reports that the children are often the most vulnerable to things that most people wouldn’t even think had toxins. He cites carpets in bedrooms and fragranced candles or air fresheners. “No air is being made fresh by the use of those things.They are chemicals that are based on oil and can really cause trouble for kids with asthma. Grassroots is also involved in reducing exposure to diesel exhaust, which is not only a known cause of lung cancer, but a cause of asthma.” A recent big win for environmental health was when New York banned the use of pesticides on school playing fields statewide. Grassroots helped by producing a short documentary film about the dan- gers of pesticides on lawns.Wood transferred his audio talents to video on this one, shooting in HD and editing on Final Cut. Music was provided by Om- nimusic, of course. “The jump to video wasn’t too hard for me.The pacing for music and video is the same thing; give your audience a chance to breath.” Grassroots also researched and wrote a paper on the relative cost of organic lawn care as opposed to chemical lawn care — organic actually costs less. “I think that really helped turn the tide in Albany with the politicians,” he says. Wood realizes that a large part of spreading the word is reaching out to the young, and wife Patty does just that, talking at schools about how to be en- vironmentally responsible. She has two programs: “Gifts from the Earth” for first and second graders, where she talks about the gifts Earth has given us, which is air, water and soil; and “I’ll Have the Plastic Fish Special Please” for 4th and 5th graders about the proliferation of plastic in our society and where it ends up. “It breaks down to tinier and tinier pieces until it’s ingested by fish,” explains Wood.“Now we are pulling fish out of the water and can measure the amount of plastic in their flesh.” For Woods, this isn’t rhetoric, it’s a way of life, often finding himself talking about environmental issues at shows like NAB and at ASCAP meetings. “You can live a healthy life in a toxic world.You just need to know how.” www.postmagazine.com February 2011 • Post 45

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