Chris Borden and Caleb Van Winkle, of Seattle's Loaded Pictures, talk about why they jumped on GenArts' new Sapphire suite rental program

Last month, GenArts began offering a rental program that gives its users access, per single workstation for 30 days, to the company’s 200+ Sapphire filters for just $169. We spoke with producer Chris Borden and co-creative director Caleb Van Winkle, partners at Loaded Pictures in Seattle, about how the program works and why they decided to give it a try.
What was your first reaction when you heard about the rental program?

Chris: We were thrilled. Sapphire filters are such great tools for our designers to use. The one drawback, however, is price. We started with one seat, which Caleb initially purchased himself. And based on the complexity of the Sapphire encryption-which I totally understand and respect-there’s no way to hack it and make it work on more than one machine. We’re a smaller shop, so we often hire freelancers when certain jobs require us to scale. But having four or five designers working on just one machine at one time wasn’t practical. Plus, we need them to have all the same tools when it comes time to render, or else it becomes a bigger headache for us if we don’t have the right elements in place. And because the majority of our work is commercial and corporate, there often just wasn’t the budget to handle that. When we found out that there was a way to rent these at a tenth of the price, it made total sense. And it is so easy to justify, especially when we’re doing a bigger job with a lot of freelancers. I’d never heard of anything like this before. You just usually buy your software outright, and that’s it, unless it’s shareware, but you’re never going to find the caliber of software you get with the Sapphire plugs in a semi-free shareware app.

Caleb: I found the filters about three or four years ago, when I was doing work at a post house, and fell in love with them. There aren’t many suites out there that cover all your bases. And the quality and fidelity of the Sapphire filters stood out. Granted, it was a little les intuitive than the other stuff, but that engineering is what makes them look so good. And you get a whole library of just about every effect you’ll ever need. You never have to worry, “Can I do that?” or “Do I even have that effect?”

Chris: As a result of that rental, we found out that [GenArts] had a special for renters where they would take off two month’s rental from the purchase price. So we just went ahead and bought another seat license of the full suite. Now we have two. We’ll be renting more on this new job we’re doing right now, so hopefully, over the course of the next year and a half, we can keep acquiring Sapphire seats, one license at a time. It’s so nice to know they are there, ready to go, whenever we get a large-scale project.

Which host do you use them with?

Caleb: The OpenFX format support is key; we use Sapphire mostly with After Effects and Nuke. I did load it into Final Cut, which we use for offline editing, just to see what it can do, but it’s just slower to work in Final Cut that way, so I don’t ever do it.

Did you use the filters on your recent title sequence/trailer project for Halo Legends (Microsoft/343 Industries), which premiered at Comic-Con?

Caleb: It couldn’t have been more perfect timing. We found out about the rental program about three days before that job came in. I really wanted to use Sapphire on the trailer, which is for an upcoming Blu-ray/DVD collection of animated shorts set in the universe of the XBox game. With the low rental price, we could ramp up the seats as we needed. It was a fully 3D project, so we relied a lot on Sapphire light and glow effects to help achieve a kind of atmospheric lighting in outer space, from solar particles to the overall quality of light. We wanted to create a dark yet glowing environment of stars and planets.

Chris: It was a tight schedule. We started the project about five weeks prior to the event, but we didn’t get any of the animation from the studios until about ten days before, so we were building all these 3D elements in a vacuum without knowing what the shots were going to be. So having all the plug-ins and having all the software up and running ahead of time was really helpful for the designers to be able to do the R+D necessary for the quality of work that we wanted.

Were you able to go to the premiere itself?

Chris: We really wanted to go, but the event itself was sold out so long in advance and our client said, due to the small venue, they just couldn’t guarantee that they could squeeze us in. But they did videotape the very end of the premiere of the trailer, and it was great to be able to hear and see the reaction from the crowd. It’s so rare to get that kind of feedback. We usually just finish a project and hand it off.

To see the full trailer, visit www.loadedpictures.com.