Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/526086
www.postmagazine.com 36 POST JUNE 2015 PICTURE THIS! the road." Brain Farm also has a 42-inch Dolby PRM-4200 professional reference mon- itor in its color grading suite. "Dolby has always had high-quality products," says Holland. "This display has a ton of fea- tures: DCIP, HD-SDI inputs, 2K support." The company opted for a Sony VPL- VW1100ES 4K projector and an SI Black Diamond 1.4 Zero Edge screen when it recently upgraded its theater. "When you have a 4K end product, you get the most value from viewing it in as big an environment as you can put it in," Hol- land says. "Our work is more theatrical, so projection seemed the proper way to go. A lot of the distribution for our film, The Art of Flight, in association with Red Bull, was theatrical and touring venues. Our new skate film, We Are Blood, and others will follow a similar model with distribution via iTunes, Blu-ray DVD and international film tours." PIXOMONDO At LA's Pixomondo (www.pixomondo. com), a 4K themed park ride film was the motivator to acquiring a Dell UP3214Q Ultra Sharp 32-inch Ultra HD 4K monitor for the DI theater/screening room about 18 months ago. It replaced a Dell 24-inch HD monitor and complements another Dell display and an HP DreamColor mon- itor for client viewing. When Pixomondo began working on the ride film, Star Journey, for the Wanda Wuhan Movie Theme Park in Wuhan, Chi- na, it needed a way to review 4K stereo 30fps material in full 4K resolution. So it considered the options. "At the time, there was no reason- ably-priced projector capable of handling 4K," recalls Pixomondo head of IT, Felix Fissel. "So we found Dell's 4K monitor through a Dell marketing program. We've used Dell monitors for a long time — at least since 2007. We've always been happy with their color consistency across the pipeline and their quality, and we've found them to be longer lasting than any other brand." Pixomondo was an early adopter of 4K monitoring in its DI theater, where it's used by the colorist to review dailies and perform color grading, and by the client to view full-resolution images. "We can fine tune a lot of settings on the 4K monitor," says Fissel. "Color calibration is easy for us to do; we get good results. And the monitor was smoothly integrat- ed with our Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve running on a Mac Pro." Pixomondo expects to upgrade other monitors to 4K as projects in 4K and 6K increase, he reports. The company recent- ly finished another ride film, the 6K single eye, Flying Over Hubei, for the Wanda Wuhan Movie Theme Park. They can display 6K images on their 4K monitor for now, but Fissel anticipates the day when "the client will want to see full 6K images." So, monitor manufacturers take note! "We've been very happy with Dell products," Fissel concludes. "We just don't see the same level of quality from the competition." DIT DAVE SATIN A 30-year veteran of the film and video business, Dave Satin of New York City's Digital Cinema Engineering LLC is a DIT on features and television. Last summer he worked in Atlanta on the sci-fi film, Insurgent and was with the 2nd unit of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. Satin provides his own DIT cart outfit- ted with Sony BVM-E250 Trimaster EL, BVM-F250 and PVM-2541A OLED mon- itors, all in 24- to 25-inch sizes — "the larg- est monitors that fit comfortably on my cart and can be moved easily," he says. Satin was sold on OLED technology as soon as he saw Sony OLED monitors at a SMPTE session about four years ago. He badgered the Sony sales rep until he got a monitor on-set for TV show Royal Pains later that spring. "We were abso- lutely dumbstruck by the bright whites, black blacks and the purity of the colors — things we take for granted today," he recalls. "Since then there have been two or three OLEDs on my cart for every job; we no longer switch pictures to one moni- tor, now there are monitors dedicated to each camera. And they match perfectly, which the old technology never did." Satin is especially appreciative of his BVM-E250 reference monitor. "It features true blacks and vivid whites, and is resistant to optical flare due to less than optimal viewing environments — a common problem in film-style produc- tion," he notes. "The accurate, vibrant color reproduction of the Sony OLED monitors, combined with their absolute stability in grey-scale reproduction, has given me so much confidence and trust that I now use two of them mounted side by side on my cart, something I never would have done with old-style CRT or LCD monitors." Satin says the "high picture quality of the Sony OLED monitors allow me to work more efficiently and save my clients time and money because of the consistent, top-notch performance of the BVM-E250. Now that I've embraced and mastered the use of Sony OLED reference monitors, I can't imagine using anything else." Currently, Satin monitors in HD for 4K Pixomondo relies on Dell monitors for DI and screening rooms. Head of IT, Felix Fissel is inset. DIT Dave Satin is using Sony's PVM- 2541A OLED monitor in his cart for on- set work.