GHOST CREATES CUTTING EDGE COMMERCIALS AND SHORT FILMS WITH BLUEFISH444 HD|LUST AND ASSIMILATE SCRATCH®
20 September, 2007
Ghost in Copenhagen, the biggest digital visual effects house in Scandinavia, is utilizing Bluefish444 HD|Lust and ASSIMILATE SCRATCH® to produce commercial spots, music videos and feature films for advertising agencies and film production companies.
After nearly ten years in business, Ghost’s reputation for delivering high-quality, design-led CG animation and visual effects has helped it to continually attract flagship Scandinavian advertising work for names such as Lego, Nokia, Siemens, Hornbach and Carlsberg beer. They often deliver the countless versions required for pan-European or global campaigns.
The Bluefish444 HD|Lust offers a hardware capability that post professionals and producers of video features and projects didn’t have before – high resolution input and quality output within an easy-touse data-centric workflow. Combined with ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH data-centric workflow, Ghost now has another tool for building its digital workflow that will streamline and increase productivity for the creative and post processes.
Dual systems are employed to expedite the post production on a range of HD and 2K projects. One is used as a dedicated grading, conforming and facility-wide media distribution hub, while the second provides extra capacity when the workload increases, as well as a resource for training and creative color experimentation.
With the SCRATCH/HD Lust system, Ghost is able to work with its clients in a manner which best meets their needs – they are able to capture material from HDCAM SR or 2K tapes, conform the EDLs provided by the editors, show projects in final form, with color, resolution and edits, as well as easily compare different versions. With quick changes in the edits, Ghost offers real-time color grading and can try different color scenarios and offer color grading for the finalized spot, working directly with the client to pick the best choices and discuss alternatives. It also provides means for project data management and allows the in-house team time to review the work in progress and plan the production ahead.
Utilizing the Bluefish HD|Fury in a Windows-based high-performance workstation, Ghost has a means to convert HD video to data for the post process then output again to HD. For commercials, the HD|Lust can be used for input and output. This allows them to take sequences of DPX from HDCAM SR, do the color correction within SCRATCH, and then put it back to HDSR or to tape. Ghost uses the HD|Lust board in conjunction with SCRATCH for capturing, conforming, color grading, and mastering of its projects. Additionally, the ability to capture in native DPX format is a big advantage for Ghost.
Sascha Haber, Colorist, states, “The Bluefish444 HD|Lust card, and especially the Symmetry software, has saved my day many times. The HD|Lust has been in heavy use since February, for such demanding projects as the Coke Zero ad, the DONG energy commercials , three music videos and many short films.
Typically, the footage is delivered to us on HDCAM or HDCAM/SR tapes because of their superior quality, and I capture the material with the help of an EDL, which often has clips from different tapes in out-of-order sequence in it. Symmetry software captures directly to DPX frames, stores the material with handles in the right folders, so that I can get to conform in Scratch right away, without any further processing steps. In all these months, it has never dropped a single frame, and I can say that we are really happy with the product.”
