Dave Waller has thought about putting a telecine suite into his Boston -based shop, Brickyard VFX, but always stopped short when he considered the cost of the talent and the equipment. At a company with no sales or account people, it just didn’t make sense. Instead Waller, Brickyard’s founder, made the jump into "virtual telecine" by signing on to offer Ascent Media’s real-time satellite color correction services. Now clients sitting in his bays can work with A-list colorists at Ascent’s LA shops Company 3, Riot and Encore.
Late in April, some of Waller’s local Boston agency clients gathered in a suite at Brickyard to do a two-hour session with Company 3’s president, Stefan Sonnenfeld, who was working in Santa Monica. " Stefan is insanely fast," said Waller, who was sold on "UP Satellite" by the colorist who had championed the concept at Ascent.
Waller’s biggest concern before committing to be the program’s second site was whether the satellite-transmitted video image would hold up under the intense scrutiny of a color correction session. "I saw a demo in LA where they switched between film laced up on a Spirit 2K and the satellite feed. I know you can measure the difference on a scope, but to my eye there was no difference," he said.
The image that clients at Brickyard see is encoded at about three times the bit rate of a consumer DVD title in10 Mbps MPEG-2. "There’s absolutely no degradation and no artifacts on a still image," said Ascent’s Francesca Cohn, director of strategic development. "The only time I’ve seen artifacting is in the greens in running footage, but the color stays 100 percent accurate."
After a virtual session wraps, finished copies are made from the master that is laid down in LA and overnighted to clients.
"Financially it’s going to make more sense to fly to LA if it’s a two-day session," said Cohn. "The average session runs about six hours, but we do get people doing packages talking about 14 hours. At that point, it’s probably cheaper to fly in but that can vary city to city depending on airfare."
To book a virtual telecine session with an Ascent artist, clients call Company 3, Riot or Encore directly. Artists available include Sonnenfeld, Sean Coleman, Mike Cosola, Crash, Bob Festa, Siggy Ferstl, Dave Hussey, Clark Muller, Mike Pethel, Arnold Ramm, Steve Rodriguez, Rob Sciaratta and Mark Wilkins. Talent and satellite time is handled in LA. A separate bill is paid to the hosting facility for time spent in one of their suites interacting remotely with the colorist.
At press time, Cohn was firming up new partnerships in Chicago, Miami, Portland, Cleveland, Atlanta and Mexico City (at Ascent’s own Rushes).
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