Amalgamated Clyde, Inc. Dives into WildBlue AV
May 27, 2004
Amalgamated Clyde
has two missions. First, we provide post-production, animation,
and compositing services to ad agency, corporate, and broadcast
clients. To do this competitively means we have to be knowledgeable
about all of the subsystems that keep the workflow smooth
and allow us to meet our clients’ needs
on their schedules. Over the years we’ve leveraged
that knowledge to fulfill a second mission: providing consulting
services to a somewhat different client base looking for
advice on making the most of their digital content delivery
choices, with a special emphasis on small-scale HD theater
applications.
When we recently decided to add to our SD infrastructure
we were immediately drawn to the Bluefish444 Wildblue AV
for two reasons. We liked the fact that the card supported
our existing choices for editing and compositing software
and our technical requirement of providing the best-looking
pictures possible meant we wanted to have 10bit RGB capability
at our fingertips when we needed it.
Our goal was to build a small 4 node 8 CPU renderfarm that,
along with a switch, would reside in a 5RU rack frame that
we could move from place to place in a rolling case. It needed
to support compositing, 3D animation, and uncompressed SD
editing.
We turned to Boxx
Technologies, a company with whom we’ve
had a long-standing and successful relationship, to supply
us with the 4 dual CPU single rack unit computers and to
integrate the Wildblue AV and some large SCSI drives in one
of the machines. We weren’t really prepared for the
way this little powerhouse rack would change our workflow.
Normally, we would test a new configuration before we put
it to use, but in this case we took the bold and perhaps
brash step of deploying it for the first time in March 2004,
on an important corporate meeting opener for an ad agency
with a large pharmaceutical account. The specifications for
the job required that we use a number of stock footage shots
which were originated in film and telecined to digital betacam.
There was also a dramatic scenario to be shot and for this,
we turned to our sister company, Advance Visuals, for their
experience on the production side. They shot this segment
on 16mm film using the newest Kodak ISO100 and ISO500 stocks.
This material was telecined to digital betacam and scene
color-correction was done during the transfer using a DaVinci
color corrector.
The next step was
our rough cut. We captured all of the material from the
shoot directly through Premiere Pro. The very first thing
we noticed when we played back the captured footage was
that it looked exactly like the source footage. It had
a transparency that I hadn’t seen from any other
card or NLE that I have worked with. I compared the results
to footage captured with another of our NLE systems and really
noticed the difference by comparing the grain structure of
the film image, which was somewhat blurred-out by the other
uncompressed capture card. There were also subtle color shifts
in the footage that were not present in the clips captured
with the Wildblue. My immediate reaction was “wow-
this is just what I need to do truly reliable work in color-correction
and image filtering”. As I worked more with Premiere
Pro I noticed the Wildblue AV responded smoothly and dependably.
I’m big on feel when it comes to cutting. I don’t
want hardware to interrupt my process, so I was really pleased
to see how well the card handled all the standard editing
tasks. Scrubbing through the timeline, for instance, was
magical.
After our rough
cut was in good shape, we turned to Digital Fusion to complete
the color-correction of the stock shots and to make some
animated graphics. We captured the stock footage using
Symmetry, which controlled the Sony ADW500 flawlessly.
I used 10 bit YUV mode for capture, mostly out of poor
planning. Next time I would probably just go ahead and
capture 10bit RGB for material I was bringing directly
into DF. Playback of the source footage through DF worked
great and it looked so nice that I couldn’t resist
spending a little extra time noodling with it.
The next step was
to create some animated graphics in DF. I’ve been doing a lot of this stuff on my laptop lately,
just for the sake of convenience, so working on the dual
2.8gHz Xeon machine with playback on the Wildblue was shockingly
powerful. I kept adding layers, animating them and just playing
through the timeline in realtime. It was only when I added
a particle tool with lots of glowy particles that I saw a
slowdown. No problem, I said, time to kick in the other nodes.
After that I started using network preview to RAM and playing
that back through the Wildblue. It was truly awesome. Instead
of settling for a half-size crappy looking preview, I was
looking at the real thing, and my client could look at it
without me having to say “imagine that orange will
be a little more yellow when we watch it on the NTSC monitor.”
With the graphics completed, we finished our cut in Premiere
Pro. As usual we were working right down to the deadline
trying to accommodate client requested changes, eating bad
food and drinking coffee to make it through the wee hours
of the morning to make our delivery time. So it was a great
relief to find that the performance of the Wildblue AV was
solid. No unexpected gremlins popped up at the last minute
to thwart us. Nothing got flakey. It just worked, and the
client was thrilled with the results. I was happy with the
results too, but I was even happier to know I had a new and
improved post production chain that I could rely on to achieve
better looking pictures than ever before.
Amalgamated Clyde Incorporated has been providing post-production,
compositing, and animation services since 1990. The company
has been located in New York since 1998, where it serves
primarily an advertising agency client base. Amalgamated
Clyde also provides HD systems design for post-production,
distribution, and projection. The company focuses on meeting
the needs of its clients on time and on budget, while bringing
the highest level of creative design to their projects.
Clyde Tressler, President
Amalgamated Clyde, Incorporated
New
York, New York
www.amalgamated-clyde.com
