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Cinemotion has International Intentions with SCRATCH^®

www.assimilateinc.com © Copyright ASSIMILATE, Inc. September 2008

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These days, when the post production of motion pictures, commercials and broadcast content can happen just about anywhere, and frequently does, Cinemotion based in Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia, is throwing its hat into the ring.

The company was founded in 1998, offering editorial, CG animation and VFX post production services to the local broadcast, commercials and music video markets. More recently, however, Cinemotion has been eyeing the international landscape, and this was uppermost in the company’s thinking when it augmented its capabilities with the introduction of SCRATCH from ASSIMILATE.

With SCRATCH integrated into its pipeline – for rushes review, online conforming, creative grading and DI – Cinemotion is now supplementing its local diet with commercials for internationally recognized brands such as Molson Dry beer, Hyundai cars, Adobe, HP, Doritos and Comcast. Amongst its initial DI credits in the feature film market is “Zift,” the debut picture from acclaimed Bulgarian theatre director Javor Gardev, which won the award for best director and the Silver St. George at the 30th Moscow Film Festival.

“We want to be contenders, to attract more international work, especially feature films, and we believe SCRATCH will help us enormously with this,” says Victor Trichkov, the owner and founder of Cinemotion. “As we have a RED camera, we can also offer a complete HD, 2K or 4K shoot-to-delivery cycle for people who want to shoot as well as post here.”

Cinemotion’s SCRATCH runs on an 8-core workstation fitted with an Nvidia Quadra 5500 SDI card, and a dual-channel 4Gb fiber channel connected to the company’s SAN network. SCRATCH’s 580Mb/s read/write capability allows real-time finishing and post with 10-bit HD, 2K, even RED 4K footage.

“It’s rare, even on complex grades that use multiple layers and masks, to see any reduction in performance on SCRATCH,” states Trichkov. “It also has excellent data management and editorial capabilities. The conform of 150 shots takes about two seconds. Ultimately SCRATCH is really efficient, responsive and snappy.”

Trichkov says the introduction of SCRATCH has had some interesting consequences – within Cinemotion itself, and the wider Bulgarian production industry. “Since we integrated SCRATCH into our workflow, our other compositing systems are becoming more and more idle. The reason is simple – SCRATCH’s true real-time performance on resolutions up to 4K. Also, prior to SCRATCH, all grading in Bulgaria was done on a telecine, straight from film. Now, most shows that are shot on film use the telecine as an ingest scanner and then to deliver a fiat, low-contrast grade. This protects the dynamic range of the picture so that we can do the final grading in SCRATCH. The results are spectacular, as we are not limited by a hardware-based system, and our clients are happy because the price is lower than a regular telecine.”

Of course, it helps when the most experienced colorist in the country is working with you. Cinemotion’s chief colorist, and partner in the DI side of the business, Todor Todorov, has graded well over 1000 commercials and 100 feature films during his career. He has been using SCRATCH for less than a year, switching away from hardware-based systems, and is a self-confessed evangelist.

“SCRATCH has the complete toolset and advanced features that simply… work!” Todorov declares. “It has everything you need for professional color grading, in a fully-featured environment, without the need to go to other applications. “The Tangent control surface provides a familiar interface for telecine graders, so it is easy to migrate to SCRATCH. With Scaffolds you get state-of-the-art selective grading, and I especially love the Qualifier, that lets you select the color of a particular pixel and make precise multi-layer color grades, without the need for hand mattes. I am getting great results with these features.”

Todorov points to the double-award winning “Zift,” a genre mixture of neo-noir and socialist art, as a good example of what SCRATCH can do within a DI pipeline. Although “Zift” is a b&w film, it was actually shot on 8mm, 16mm and 35mm color film stocks. Lensed in anamorphic by leading Bulgarian DP Emil Hristov, it is the story of Moth, who was wrongfully convicted of murder and thrown into jail before the Bulgarian communist coup of 1944. He is later freed on parole and finds himself in a new and alien world – the totalitarian Sofia of the 1960s.

“The movie was shot with a SCRATCH DI in mind, and this was of great help creatively and in terms of speed to us, Javor the director and Emil the DP,” says Todorov. “Knowing that we would use the Qualifier and selectives to push and finesse the look during the grade, they were able to use different gels and projector colors on set. For example, Emil would light the main actor yellow and the background blue. Taking this footage into SCRATCH Scaffolds and the Qualifier this made the b&w separations easier. We could fine tune the contrast on different parts of the picture and easily adjust the overall look.” It proved a huge time-saver too. The whole DI on “Zift” took just six days, “but it could easily have been three times that, or more, if SCRATCH had not been involved,” says Todorov. “The conform was flawless, and we were able to work on the whole movie, more than 1300 shots, on one timeline. I used the versioning panel extensively to maintain different grades for the director and the DP, as well as the final grade.” All viewing and grading on “Zift” was done via a digital projector in HD (1920 x 1200), using a LUT developed in-house to match the HD with the film-out. “It’s interesting to see how the DI paradigm is being increasingly adopted for the commercials we’re working on,” adds Todorov.

Cinemotion was the first company in Bulgaria with a RED camera. Despite the fact that other cameras are now available from different suppliers Trichkov sees that SCRATCH has given his company another useful opportunity.

“As SCRATCH is currently the only option for full-resolution, real-time grading of RED R3D footage, we are grading everything that is shot on RED, and even our competitors are our clients now,” he says.

SCRATCH used for post production on double-award winning black and white film “Zift”.

© 2008 Cinemotion Blog.