Red One Makes Big Gains Against HD in Commercials

Change is afoot at Nice Shoes, the New York commercial post facility that recently invested more than $3 million to upgrade its color-correction rooms from their long-standing da Vinci suites to brand-new Baselight EIGHT systems. The company has also consolidated, bringing its VFX subsidiary Guava in house. The move puts the VFX artists in close working proximity with the telecine department, a move Nice Shoes hopes will have a streamlining effect on the whole process.

Top: Colorist Lenny Mastrandrea works on a new Baselight EIGHT at Nice Shoes

The integration of Guava will reduce the company’s total overhead, allow it to move quicker, and encourage more collaboration among staff members, according to Jack Fahey, who just moved into the role of head of sales at Nice Shoes after spending 18 months in business development for the Nice Shoes-created web app Nice Spots. “The meaning of the phrase ‘in a timely fashion’ has accelerated,” he notes, meaning facilities must figure out faster, more efficient ways to do good work for clients.

When F&V visited last week, Nice Shoes had just completed the first of three Baselight EIGHT installations, incorporating 50 TB of storage per room. The first of two Baselight ONEs is set up at a small desk across the hall, where an assistant sets up jobs on a system that lacks the processing power of the bigger machines but taps into the same pool of storage. (The idea is to have assistants working at night on scanning and conforming tasks, saving expensive room time on the big systems.) The Baselight EIGHT systems will render out to a SAN at faster-than-real-time speeds, and the results are archived to tape. Seven Flame systems can also access those SANs, meaning VFX artists can work on footage as its being color-graded, and the results can be conformed at the end of the process.

“Color-correction hit a dead end seven years ago,” says Nice Shoes colorist Lenny Mastrandrea as he describes the seductive power of new systems like the Baselight – unlimited layers of color-correction, and 2K grading in real time. Asked whether the new capabilities encourage clients to spend more time futzing with their images, he recalls the early days of digital grading, when clients sometimes felt the need to make one more change just because one last power window was still available on screen. By the time you reach that point, he counsels, “you’re just throwing money out the window. It doesn’t require being that meticulous to get a great image.”

Red on the Rise

Baselight’s systems are known for featuring a Red-friendly toolset, which likely figured in Nice Shoes’ decision, given that Mastrandrea says some 30 percent of the company’s business is projects shot with the Red One. With that kind of experience, Mastrandrea knows his way around Red workflows. That means most of the problems he encounters these days stem from clients doing their own conversions of the Red footage.

What kind of mistakes are Red users making? “Don’t shoot 2K and hand me 1080s,” Mastrandrea says, citing clients who’ve tried to save time by exporting Red footage to HD instead of converting it to a 2K DPX sequence. That said, Nice Shoes is working on new solutions that will make converting the Red footage to the DPX format faster.

Red’s gains have been HD’s losses, for the most part – film still accounts for about 60 percent of the footage that comes into Nice Shoes, with HD representing only around one in 10 jobs. That’s because film still offers the kind of latitude that serves as supplemental insurance on a high-end commercial job. “For us to not be able to get a nice image out of a piece of [35mm] negative, someone had to really screw up,” Mastrandrea says.

For more information: www.niceshoes.com