Unexpected GmbH
International Collaboration to "Stop the Net"
"Axio provided the easiest, fastest, and most responsive HD-editing I've done so far. Scrubbing through the timeline and working with the Matrox realtime filters was so smooth, I had the feeling I was handling offline 10:1 compressed SD data instead of full-resolution uncompressed HD material."
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an international organization renowned for its efforts to conserve natural resources, has launched a global campaign aimed at reducing illegal bycatches - marine creatures caught accidentally in fishing gear intended for other species - that are driving some species to extinction and inhibiting the recovery of other species already at risk.
A key component of the campaign is the commercial "Aquarium" created by up-and-coming German commercial directors Steffen Hacker and Alexander Kiesl at unexpected GmbH. Their clip "Racing Beat" won the Young Director Award 2005 of the European Federation for commercial film producers and a Special Jury Prize from the Broadcast Association of Europe Cannes 2005, among other accolades.
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Hacker and Kiesl' s jobs as animators and visual effect artists usually get started after the live-action has been shot. For the "Aquarium" spot, their challenge was not only to create a tank full of photorealistic digital animals but also to incorporate a new editing system - Matrox Axio - into the workflow of their postproduction facility.
Together with "Spyfilms" and the agency "Foote, Cone and Belding" (both Toronto, Canada), the 30-second spot was shot at the Vancouver Aquarium in front of the huge Beluga aquarium. But the Belugas had to vanish completely and the tank had to be filled with a variety of sealife instead - coral, sea turtles, dolphins and schools of fish that had to look real and even interact with the humans standing in front of the tank.
Since every single frame had to be digitally retouched and the deadline was extremely tight, the Panasonic Varicam was chosen for the shoot. The digital HD data (1280 x 720 pixels progressive at 60 frames per second) was captured into Matrox Axio using the uncompressed 10-bit codec to maintain quality.
"We wanted to stay completely in the highquality HD pipeline to be able to transfer the final result to film for theatrical screenings when needed," said Steffen Hacker. "On the other hand, we were able to mix this pristine footage with even the crappiest hard-compressed MPEG-1 layout shots that we produced as an animatic - all on one timeline - and the machine didn't look troubled at all. Axio provided the easiest, fastest, and most responsive HD-editing I've done so far. Scrubbing through the timeline and working with the Matrox realtime filters was so smooth, I had the feeling I was handling offline 10:1 compressed SD data instead of full-resolution uncompressed HD material."
Even a great editing experience does not guarantee flawless post production however, because when it comes to 3D animation and compositing the captured footage has to be used in different ways and on many different machines. Alexander Kiesl remembers, "In former times we would never have a realtime preview on our broadcast monitors - everything coming from the render farm or from compositing had to be transcoded to work in our old "high end" editing system first. The transcoding duplicated the files and caused us to waste precious storage space."
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"Now every animation, compositing, and graphics creation workstation on our network can easily access the HD footage captured by Axio using standard Windows file sharing. Using Premiere Pro running in Video for Windows mode, we can open any project created with Axio on an Adobe After Effects workstation for viewing and copying to After Effects using the famous copy & paste function. The ability to import the whole edit into the compositing program in just a few seconds means it's no big deal to change the edit, even late in the process, if the client wished to," said Hacker. "What's more, every 3D workstation has the Matrox software drivers installed, so we can read the original video files from the shared storage and use them in the background to create an in-context 3D animation, without the need to crop, trim or convert the video footage. We no longer risk losing control of the project because of a huge number of different converted files to manage."
"Adding the composited or animated sequences back onto the timelime for viewing on the HD monitor is faster and easier than on any editing system ever before used at unexpected GmbH. After Effects just renders out to the Matrox uncompressed codec directly onto the Axio RAID where the composited clip can be put on the timeline immediately without any further conversion. And, most important of all, we can even overwrite a file that is already in a Premiere project. Artists can deliver newer versions of their shots all the time and the editor just does not have to worry about it, he can focus entirely on his edit!"
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"Since we worked with international clients on 'Aquarium' it was important to deliver previews quickly and easily via the internet. We were very happy with Premiere's fast MPEG export that worked flawlessly in Axio."
Hacker is now looking forward to producing bigger projects and music videos on his Matrox Axio system. "We are already upgrading our Axio to a Dual-Core dualprocessor Opteron system to take advantage of the extra realtime capabilities that we'll get thanks to Matrox's 'Power of X' scalability. We can't wait to see what the editing experience will be like with all that added power."
More information about the "Stop the Net" campaign can be found at www.stopthenet.ca.
More information about unexpected GmbH and the "Aquarium" commercial in High Definition WMV format can be found at www.unexpected.de (click on "visual effects" and then the first frame at the bottom of the page).
To view the award-winning clip "Racing Beats" visit http://www.hackermovies.com/77904.
