Home NYC is an independent editorial/design/effects facility that offers a full range of editing, composting and effects creation services, from original concept to finished product. In the past couple of years the company has seen a tremendous increase in the amount HD acquired material coming through its doors. Home NYC is a heavy user of Autodesk's Smoke-an integrated editing and finishing system for SD, HD, 2K film and above-which Tyler said gets them through any type of HD project with ease.
Describe the type of clients you work with on HD projects.
Commercial advertising, broadcast design and music-video clients are some of our key customers who are increasingly using HD as an acquisition format. Although the final product is not always HD, having better quality images from the start gives us greater flexibility in post when it comes to manipulating images and for compositing.
What's the best way for clients to prepare material for you, in order to save them time and money?
The best thing to do is to have a conversation with us first. Every job is different. If we are doing a conform, we need clean EDLs or OMFs, and if the offline was done in 29.97 time code, we need to translate the list to 24p. Autodesk Smoke does this for us with a click of a button. If we are editing from scratch (which we do most often), we need to know the frame rate of the acquired material and what the specs of the final master will be. When we work at HD resolutions, we usually finish everything in 24p and either cross-convert or downconvert from there.
File management becomes critical for HD projects. Explain how you handle files.
The Smoke really doesn't care what size files we use. We mix and match resolution while editing all the time. We use a lot of large still photos that are bigger than HD size. When we need these, we simply load them from one of our Macs to our system via FTP. We export QuickTimes and file sequences the same way. It is relatively quick and painless.
New functionality in Smoke allows you to handle variable frame rates, like footage captured with a Panasonic VariCam. Explain the advantage the Smoke system gives you for HD projects like this.
Handling VariCam files in Smoke allows me to use all of Smoke's other tools. My old method of using VariCam was to load through Final Cut Pro and then export QuickTime files or use an external frame converter and cross-convert tapes. I no longer have to do that, and I have all of my tracking, color-correct and keying tools at my disposal.
How does Smoke operate on a shared network? Are there issues to be concerned with, in terms of accessibility to media?
We use our Smoke on a network with a Flame real-time visual effects design and compositing system, many Mac workstations, and a few Combustion workstations. The Flame and Smoke systems communicate via Wire [Autodesk's networking solution for the high-speed transfer of media over TCP/IP] and Combustion can gain access to the Stone framestores via Wiretap, another Autodesk program that allows us to access stored media without converting files or copying media across the network. We move files back and forth between the Macs via FTP.
What's the biggest misconception about posting an HD project?
The biggest misconception is that it will take just as long as an NTSC project. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Although straight editing is just as fast, effects and compositing take longer. There's a lot more pixels to push around.
For more on Home NYC, visit www.homenyc.tv