Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/9707
[ cont. from 43 ] DA T ACENTRIC WORKFLOWS Bingham’s Crazy Heart — was captured on Sony XDCAM. “XDCAM is interesting, because with Avid they have a feature called AMA (All Media Access), which has significantly helped to take the bottleneck out of the transcoding process. Essentially there is no transcoding.This enables the software to play those clips into the machine in realtime.That is a breakthrough, as far as I am concerned.That made it efficient and tolerable. It’s an easier process to be able to edit with something shot on the XDCAM format... same with P2. If the same happens for Red, we are golden, that will significantly improve the workflow.That will be a major breakthrough.” Ashley says now it gets interesting in the backend of the workflow “because you are having to deal with color correcting, which [when shooting with film] you would be taking your negative to a telecine session, doing color correct there and transfer- ring that onto a high resolution tape format and finishing on a Flame, for example. Now you have to color correct material that is typically ingested at full resolution into a nonlinear editing system. So that alters the traditional workflow “ Company X finished the piece in Avid and color corrected in the NLE instead of going out of house. He uses Magic Bullet and for this Ryan Bingham video, he used it to add a little filmic touch. The video features clips of Bingham singing in a bar and cuts back to scenes from the Crazy Heart film with Jeff Bridges.“Danny has a certain aesthetic that he likes, based on his eye, his style and sensibilities as a photographer, however we were sym- pathetic to the look of the film, yet the video aspect still has that certain ‘Danny Clinch’ touch. I felt that this was one of the most seamless and natural blends of a film within a video.” It’s a whole new world out there.Ashley just worked on a couple of Avon spots shot with the Canon 5D and 7D.“I was very impressed; this is a real paradigm shift,” he concludes. TECHNICOLOR Technicolor (www.technicolor.com) in Hollywood has embraced DVS’s Clipster for working with all sorts of digital files from the field.Veteran colorist Stephen P. Arkle, known as Sparkle, recently worked on a Red-shot campaign out of NBC’s The NBC Agency that used Clipster as a lynchpin to its workflow. One particular spot was a cross promotion for Honda and the network’s series Chuck. It was part of the “Road to Vancouver” campaign surrounding the Olympics.The piece had the show’s stars driving to the Olympics, in a Honda of course, and making some fun stops along the way. “We’ve done multiple project campaigns for them — Liberty Mutual,Turbo Tax and Honda, among them,” reports Sparkle.“They have chosen the Red for acquisi- tion because they find it makes their production affordable.” The process, which Sparkle, calls “way simple,” begins with getting the client’s Red drives from the field and ingesting those into Clipster.“From Clipster we make them Avid MFX files — they can be anything from DNx 36, which is what they chose, all the way to DNx 220.The agency goes away, edits up a storm and then provides us with an EDL.We ingest this into the Clipster and then ask it to assem- ble the finished spot, because its held the original ingest.The Clipster allows us to color correct from the R3D files,” explains Sparkle, who uses the da Vinci 2K. Another thing Sparkle likes about this workflow is that you don’t have to make decisions upfront.“One of the joys of working with Clipster and Red files is when we ingest those,we are looking at them with the metadata set as [the] DP set it in the field.We can choose to take that Rec 709, or whatever color space they have cho- sen, and throw that away and go back to Red space or Red log.Or we throw away any decision they made in the field, not to be disrespectful to the photographer, but to give us a little more room and latitude so we can apply that to all the Red files purely for the selects we’ve assembled.And we can make that decision after we’ve made the assembly,so we are not stuck with any baked-in color at any stage.” With the Clipster, when you double click on the timeline, the metadata window opens up, displaying all the colorimetry.The simplicity of use allows Sparkle to focus on the creative. “If I run out of latitude on a specific shot — if I am working in the DP’s look that he set — I can choose to throw it away shot by shot or en- tirely and start from the basic logarithmic look.” The DP — Emmanuel “Manny”Vouniozos — on this piece wanted the richest possible look he could get to get “a glossy car commercial,” says Sparkle.They shot under really tough circumstances. Early morning shots, late shots, car running footage.And they went DIT-less because they were covering serious ground.” The NBC Agency has embraced this workflow because they weren’t wasting money producing materials they weren’t making use of.The Red files all lived in a virtual world and they only color corrected the pieces they specifically used. “Apart from the processing to turn them into Avid files, which was all done in the Clipster, they didn’t color correct any information that didn’t hit air,” reports Sparkle.“How many times have we sat in telecines and color corrected a multi- tude of footage only to find that 60 to 70 percent of it ended up on the cutting room floor?” Technicolor has 12 Clipsters in-house, which are currently being upgraded to 64-bit. And in addition to the daVinci 2K, they are also running Blackmagic Resolve and Autodesk Lustre. UNDER ONE ROOF [ cont. from 46 ] “One of the appeals for a shop that offers multiple capabilities is that you can price things better for a customer,” he notes.“If you do three things with us, it will be better than if you do one thing with us. A lot of that has to do with the fact that people just want to pay less for everything.We are very upfront when we are talking to somebody about a project,” says Crow, trying to relate the cost savings and convenience.“If we can package multiple services, then we can make the ultimate price more attractive.” SONICPOOL Supervising sound mixers John Frost and Patrick Bird opened up SonicPool (www.sonicpool.com) in 2001, growing it from a 300-square foot space to the 20,000-square-foot studio in Hollywood that it is today. The company has as many as 40 offline suites that can be equipped with either Avid or Apple Final Cut Pro software, along with four bullpen areas and four Pro Tools-based audio mixing suites.The studio also has four online/color correction suites outfitted with Avid Symphony DS,Assimilate’s Scratch and Final Cut HD. Customers can rent out space and bring in their own talent or work with the SonicPool staff.They even have the option to perform the offline themselves and then pass it on to the SonicPool team for finishing. “Right now we have it set up as a little production center for TV shows to come in and rent a bunch of Avid or Final Cut systems,” says co-owner Bird.“We have them all linked with shared storage.They can do all their post and offline, and we’ll give them a couple of offices.And we’ll do the finishing down the hall. They can camp out in one spot and be good to go.” The studio sees half of its work coming from trailer, promo, radio spot and commercial clients, adds partner Frost, and 50 percent in the form of long- form television shows and theatrical films. “We’ve been really lucky in that aspect,” says Bird of the diversity. “That’s what we wanted when we started the business.We had been working at other places that specialized in just one thing and we always wanted to be able to change it up and do short-form stuff and long-form stuff.” To date, networks such as MTV, HGTV and Style have posted shows at SonicPool.At press time, the stu- dio had completed work on Sony’s The Boondocks 2. Surprisingly, Bird says the studio has had no trouble keeping busy. “We keep knocking on wood,” he jokes. “We don’t do a lot of sales. Most of our business comes to us by word of mouth. A lot of times it’s the producers working on stuff that come back. It’s mostly about relationships and we try to provide good ser- vices for the right price.” Frost thinks SonicPool’s success is in part from its all- inclusive business model.“I think we probably do it a lit- tle bit differently than most of our competition,” he notes.“The way that we’ve packaged it, to get it under our roof, is probably different than other places.” He cites other studios that rent out gear to clients on an as-needed basis.“Here, our edit suites are built in, and if you rent an edit suite, you get everything that you need with that edit suite — there and then!” “I think it’s intangible,” adds Bird.“We can sell that, but really, once they get here and see what we do, that’s when it becomes clear that they are getting more for their money.” www.postmagazine.com April 2010 • Post 51