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 Lance
Bachelder
(Editor and “NLE Dude”) of O Entertainment based in San
Clemente, CA, is wrapping the first real-time Cinema 2K project
edited and finished on a PC workstation. This studio is not new
to creating firsts as it is the brain child of Steve Oedekerk,
best known for such blockbusters as “Bruce Almighty”, “Ace
Ventura” “The Nutty Professor”, “Jimmy Neutron” and “Santa vs.
the Snowman”. Lance, with Producer Paul Marshal, have been busy
working on a re-cut of a large format holiday production to be
presented in 3D for theme parks and ride films entitled,
“Santa’s Polar Blast”.
Before we don
our 3D glasses and get ready to enjoy the amazing visuals and
lively storytelling of “Santa”, let’s go back to how the
original 37 minute large format (IMAX) 3D animated feature was
repurposed as a 15-minute theme-park-ride film in Cinema 2K
resolution.
It pays to do
your homework
Lance is always
looking for the “holy grail” of NLE (non-linear editing)
applications. It was on one of these quests last NAB 2004 that
he first met David Newman, CTO of CineForm, presenting
CineForm’s Prospect HD™: a new real-time multi-stream HD editing
technology working within Adobe® Premiere® Pro. High definition
was starting to hit the workstation market, but no other company
was demonstrating multiple streams of real-time HD editing on
any PC or Mac platform. Intrigued by CineForm’s underlying
technologies that made this possible provided a good reason to
keep an eye on this software company.
The January
2005 cover story in POST Magazine on the new compressed HD
digital intermediate workflow utilized in the
feature film, “Dust to Glory”, gave validation to the CineForm
Intermediate™ compressed format for uncompromising visual
quality. At NAB 2005 Lance saw a technology demonstration with
CineForm editing multiple streams in real-time with 10-bit
precision but this time in Cinema 2K resolution. His homework
paid off as he was grappling with how to do the re-edit of the
original 2K Targa files for the “Santa’s Polar Blast” project.
Stuck in data
overload
The project was
literally stuck in data overload – the O Entertainment team was
trying to manipulate uncompressed 2048 x 1500 resolution Targa
files with no success even on a beefy PC and with a well known
NLE software application. It was simply too much overhead for
the storage sub-system, computer and software to handle for an
interactive post production process. “We literally had a huge
task on our hands”, laments Lance Bachelder and adds, “we
started with the original 37 minute uncompressed 2K Targas in 3D
(right eye, left eye) and a terabyte of data”. The task was to
re-edit the original film to 15 minutes while retaining the
storyline and ideally without creating additional animation. An
interactive creative process was necessary to do this, and Lance
recalled the demo of Prospect 2K with Adobe Premiere Pro.
Creating
a new Cinema 2K workflow
 To
keep the “Santa” project in-house, their traditional workflow
choice would have been to take the original 1TB of 2K sequences,
down convert them to NTSC resolution .AVI files due to data
bandwidth issues, perform the off-line edit, export the EDL,
import the EDL into Adobe After Effects…and still, Lance was
unsure that they could finish in 2K. The other consideration was
to finish in a high-end post facility to conform the 2K cut for
film out at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars.
A phone call
got the ball rolling, and soon Lance and team had an evaluation
BOXX Technologies dual AMD Opteron system complete with CineForm
Prospect 2K and Adobe Premiere Pro. The gauntlet was laid down
with the following questions:
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