Red One Makes Big Gains Against HD in Commercials
Top: Colorist Lenny Mastrandrea works on a new Baselight EIGHT at Nice Shoes
When F&V visited last week, Nice Shoes had just completed the first of three Baselight EIGHT installations, incorporating 50 TB of storage per room. The first of two Baselight ONEs is set up at a small desk across the hall, where an assistant sets up jobs on a system that lacks the processing power of the bigger machines but taps into the same pool of storage. (The idea is to have assistants working at night on scanning and conforming tasks, saving expensive room time on the big systems.) The Baselight EIGHT systems will render out to a SAN at faster-than-real-time speeds, and the results are archived to tape. Seven Flame systems can also access those SANs, meaning VFX artists can work on footage as its being color-graded, and the results can be conformed at the end of the process.
Red on the Rise
Baselight’s systems are known for featuring a Red-friendly toolset, which likely figured in Nice Shoes’ decision, given that Mastrandrea says some 30 percent of the company’s business is projects shot with the Red One. With that kind of experience, Mastrandrea knows his way around Red workflows. That means most of the problems he encounters these days stem from clients doing their own conversions of the Red footage.
What kind of mistakes are Red users making? “Don’t shoot 2K and hand me 1080s,” Mastrandrea says, citing clients who’ve tried to save time by exporting Red footage to HD instead of converting it to a 2K DPX sequence. That said, Nice Shoes is working on new solutions that will make converting the Red footage to the DPX format faster.
Red’s gains have been HD’s losses, for the most part – film still accounts for about 60 percent of the footage that comes into Nice Shoes, with HD representing only around one in 10 jobs. That’s because film still offers the kind of latitude that serves as supplemental insurance on a high-end commercial job. “For us to not be able to get a nice image out of a piece of [35mm] negative, someone had to really screw up,” Mastrandrea says.
For more information: www.niceshoes.com
Sections: Business Creativity Technology
Topics: Feature Project/Case study
Did you enjoy this article? Sign up to receive the StudioDaily Fix eletter containing the latest stories, including news, videos, interviews, reviews and more.
Leave a Reply