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3ality Digital recently moved into its 20,000-square-foot 3-D production facility in Burbank, CA, which houses feature film development, 3-D production, post production, and technology development. ASSIMILATE?s SCRATCH is at the center of 3aility Digital?s digital workflow, being used heavily for conform, color grading, preview, dailies, playout, and rough cuts. 3D is bringing an impactful and magical experience back to feature films and other imagery projects, recapturing audience excitement and making a contribution to the bottom lines of filmmakers and studios within the entertainment industry. The premiere of the U2 3D trailer at the recent ShoWest 07 by the motion picture's producer, 3ality Digital, showed that 3D has advanced beyond the gimmick it was in the past to a format that appeals to audiences. Directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington, 3ality shot nine U2 concerts in six South American cities and is also doing the post production for the feature film, scheduled for release in Fall 07 in RealD digital theaters and IMAX 3D.
?Image perfection is our passion, so being at the forefront of enabling Hollywood quality 3D films is a continual adrenaline rush,? says Steve Schklair, CEO of 3ality Digital Systems. ?Our business is making 3D easy for filmmakers so that they can expand their creativity and deliver a more impactful high-resolution film and digital product. This of course translates into a more compelling viewing experience, which means more eyeballs in the theaters. So, everyone wins ? viewers, filmmakers, studios, you name it.?
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| U2 3D feature film; produced by 3ality Digital; Industry first - combining multiple layers of 3D elements; done in SCRATCH matrix |
The 3D Wonder Boys
3ality Digital is continually perfecting new digital tools that provide the solution to everything that did not work with earlier attempts at creating and exhibiting stereo/3D images. The past limitations of 3D production included extremely heavy equipment, excessively long production schedules, noisy cameras, long set-up procedures, and days if not weeks to assemble and view dailies. In contrast, 3ality?s digital cameras are lightweight and silent, utilize advanced image processing, adjust automatically, provide instantaneous dailies, and enable production schedules that closely match a standard 2D schedule. ?Entertainment today is pushing the creative envelope with the use of digital technology ? it?s the no-contest future of TV and cinema. The quality, ease of use, cost factors, as well as the ability to experiment creatively make digital the hands-down winner. The new tools we?re creating make the 3D process easier, which means more flexibility for creators and ultimately a more exciting experience for viewers,? says Howard Postley, COO of 3ality Digital. ?Regardless of whatever arguments anyone wants to make about the quality of 2D Digital Cinema, using film for 3D is a huge disadvantage at every level; quality, cost, time and audience viewing experience.
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| U2 3D feature film; produced by 3ality Digital; Simultaneous editing of Left-Eye and Right-Eye material within SCRATCH edit tools |
The all-digital process is enabling in a way that it isn?t in 2D. For those who have seen 3D in the past, the difference is night and day.? 3ality Digital put together the largest assemblage of 3D camera technology ever used for a single project for U2 3D, a concert film capturing the Vertigo Tour stops throughout South America. With two Sony Cinealta 950 cameras per rig, each of the six cities used from two to nine rigs; four to 18 cameras. ?What?s key about our rigs is that they are purpose built. The mechanical design is exacting, and the electronics are designed to hide the technical complexity of shooting high-quality 3D imagery,? says Postley. We?re in the preproduction phase of a project for later this year in which we will be shooting using between 10 and 20 stereo rigs. Suffice it to say that this poses some unique challenges.?
SCRATCH Plays Well with 3ality
At IBC 06, 3ality Digital and ASSIMILATE demonstrated 3ality?s use of SCRATCH to create a powerful, real-time stereoscopic/3D digital workflow and data pipeline capability that runs on an optimized BOXX workstation. ?The beauty of the SCRATCH digital workflow is the potential to reduce the 3D post process from weeks or months to as little as days or hours,? says Postley. ?By using SCRATCH as the heart of our data pipeline, we have the opportunity to offer stereoscopic/3D with compelling price/performance value to meet the budgets of both large studios and independent filmmakers, enabling more audiences to experience the thrill of 3D.? 3ality also uses other tools within this pipeline, such as Avid, other industry tools, and their own 3post software and custom hardware. SCRATCH is used heavily for conform, color grading, preview, dailies, playout, and rough cuts. ?By using the dual-DVI outputs on the nVidia Quadro FX cards and the functionality of the SCRATCH CONstruct, we can create a timeline with right-eye material on one layer and left-eye material on another. The two clips can be edited as a single instance and color grading, or other effects data, can be easily applied and copied. Once any editorial fine-tuning and color grading has been applied, the dual-stream stereo imagery can be output directly from SCRATCH to the screen for review with the DP, director, and client,? says Postley. Postley adds, ?To date we?ve been using a dual projector for reviews, but in our new facility we?ll have a 24-seat, digital-cinema theater equipped with a Barco 2K digital-cinema projector and RealD 3-D system. We?ll all be able to screen the productions, perform color timing and experience the 3D as it will be seen in commercial theaters.? Before using SCRATCH as the their digital workflow for post production, 3aility used the traditional methods of cobbling 3D together, doing offlines to get the work done and going online to see the result. ?This was a time consuming, painstaking process ? it could literally take years ? and it was difficult to find people with 3D experience,? says Postley. ?Fortunately we could produce the U2 project using our new 3D camera technology and digital workflow methodology. You?ll see shots in U2 with up to seven layers of 3D ? no one has ever done this before because the tools weren?t there.? ?The beauty of SCRATCH is its simplicity. It takes the hassle out of getting the work done so that we can focus more on the creative,? says Postley. ?SCRATCH works on DPX files without converting to another format, which would mean going offline. The post process is all in real time, uncompressed, and not many tools can do this. 3D requires a lot of bandwidth and most systems can?t keep up, but SCRATCH does.?
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| U2 3D feature film; produced by 3ality Digital; SCRATCH CONstruct shows high-level view of all elements in stereo/3D timeline |
Postley adds, ?3ality has the only online 3D post facility in the world. It definitely goes to eleven. The storage capability, digital plumbing, workstations, etc. are all optimized for 3D. When I make mistakes, they are usually because I forgot that 3D is not 2 times 2D. For 3D projects, we?re working in hundreds of terabytes. For a project later this year, we plan to shoot a petabyte (1,000 terabytes) in one day. We have other projects on the board for 2009 that will take us into the exabyte realm (1,000,000 terabytes). With that much data, we need the stability and features of SCRATCH?s digital workflow to quickly get through the post process. 3D is a killer app, but so is SCRATCH.? ?ASSIMILATE understands the film/entertainment industry and what tools we creative and technical types need. The SCRATCH software is a real winner, no doubt, but their technical support with Lucas Wilson and Tony Cacciarelli is exceptional,? says Postley. ?They are so up to speed on the post production process and issues that we had no downtime with educating them about the business. They contribute ideas to the process and that?s a real bonus.?
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