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www.postmagazine.com 8 POST OCTOBER 2014 MONTREAL — Oakland, CA-based VFX studio Atomic Fiction (www.atomicfiction.com) has opened a new flagship facility in Montreal. The studio is best known for the VFX work is has contributed to mov- ies such as Star Trek Into Darkness, Transformers Age of Extinction, Need for Speed and Flight. The new location has already worked on a feature film. The Walk is based on the story of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit, and was co-produced, co-written and directed by Robert Zemeckis. "We are excited to be building upon Atomic Fiction's growth, and evaluated several possibilities for this expansion," notes Kevin Baillie, co-founder of Atomic Fiction. "There is an incredible talent base of VFX artists in Montreal, which makes it an ideal place to put down roots. We've committed to a six-year lease on a custom designed 15,000-square-foot space. The business climate and culture felt like the perfect fit, and the healthy tax incentives are the cherry on top for our filmmaker clients. There are so many reasons why Montreal is the ideal place for the DNA of our California studio continue to grow and evolve." Atomic Fiction employs a cloud-based infrastructure for visual effects, which allows it to maximize its investment in talent while minimizing hardware overhead costs. "Since our inception, we've central- ized all of our render farms and core computing power in the cloud, which allowed us to ramp up very quickly in Montreal since both facilities essentially operate under the same infrastructure and pipeline," explains Marc Sadeghi, president of Atomic Fiction. "Because of this, when projects land at Atomic Fiction, we don't have to worry about which facility has the processing power to do the job. It's more a question of pulling in the right team for the task, whether they're in California or Montreal." FORMOSA GROUP TO RE-OPEN POP SOUND BITS & PIECES SANTA MONICA, CA — Formosa Group (www.formos- agroup.com), a post production sound company serv- ing film, broadcast, commercial and interactive clients, is re-opening the facility formerly known as POP Sound at 625 Arizona Avenue. The studio closed on July 7th. The operation consists of 10 mixing stages, eight voice-over booths and an ADR stage. Artists previously employed by POP and now working at Formosa Santa Monica include mixers Nick Bozzone, Mitch Dorf, Peter Rincon, Tim West, and Tim Hoogenakker, and ADR mixer Michael Miller. Business operations staff mem- bers include EP Paula Arnett, EP/scheduler Jennifer Bowman, and facility engineer Eric Beam. "We are delighted to add this talented team to Formosa Group," says Robert C. Rosenthal, president and COO, adding that upgrades and renovations are already underway. In addition to the Santa Monica location, Formosa also has studios in West Hollywood, West Los Angeles and Burbank. ATOMIC FICTION EXPANDS WITH NEW MONTREAL STUDIO LIPSYNC BACKS SYFY'S UPCOMING OLYMPUS SERIES LONDON — LipSync (www.lipsyncpost.co.uk) will provide equity investment and full post production services for the $30M, 13-episode TV series Olympus, which is scheduled to appear on the SyFy channel in early 2015. The series is being produced by Tremadoc Productions with Reunion Pictures in association with Great Point Media, Content Television and Digital, and LipSync Productions. Olympus is a fast-paced fantasy/drama set in Ancient Greece. It follows a young and idealistic man named Hero on his journey from the Forest of Trozen to the royal court in Athens. Along the way, he encounters a range of unique and off-beat characters, including oracles, monsters, sorcerers and seductresses. LipSync's VFX team has already begun creating the world of Olympus, which will require over 50 CG environments, several mythological creatures and more than 5,000 VFX shots. Work on picture and sound post, titles, the international promo/trailer, and all deliverables will start at LipSync towards the end of the year. "Olympus is certainly one of the biggest and most challenging projects we have ever worked on," says Norman Merry, finance director at LipSync. "We're hugely excited to be playing a significant role in bringing this epic tale to life." BLUEFISH INTRODUCES UNCOMPRESSED VIDEO CARDS SOUTH MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA — Bluefish444 (www.bluefish444. com), manufacturer of uncompressed 4K/2K/HD/SD SDI video cards, in- troduced the Epoch|4K Neutron and Epoch|Neutron video cards at IBC. The Epoch Neutron cards adopt a new form factor, allowing for integra- tion into a wide range of chassis. The low-profile, half-height form factor allows both cards to be installed into low-profile servers, small form fac- tor (SFF) computers, and low-profile Thunderbolt expansion chassis. Full height shield options allow for integration in more traditional workstation computers and provide additional I/O requirements like AES/EBU, RS422 machine control, and domestic analogue audio monitoring. Epoch Neutron cards are fitted with three BNC connectors, enabling two simultaneous streams of 2K/HD/SD, including video fill+key opera- tions. Each SDI connector is programmable as input or output. The Epoch| Neutron supports 1.5G SDI I/O and the Epoch|4K Neutron extends the support to 3G SDI I/O, enabling 4K 60p I/O configurations. An HDMI 1.4a mini connector provides a low-cost 4K/2K/HD/SD HDMI monitoring pre- view, and allows for color-critical monitoring on consumer HDMI displays. The Epoch Neutron boards comes bundled with a range of free soft- ware plug-ins for Windows and Mac OS X platforms, including Adobe Creative Cloud 2014, Avid Me- dia Composer 8, Assimilate Scratch and Scratch Lab, The Found- ry's Nuke, and Drastic Tech- nologies' 4K Scope. Pricing is $2,095 and $1,695 respectively.