Siggraph

Better hardware and software are making it easier to do high-end work where it hasn‘t gone before. In July ESPN debuted The Bronx is Burning, an eight-part baseball - themed miniseries for ESPN Original Entertainment that used a compact, truck-friendly HD editing setup that makes for slick location production.

The production, shot on location throughout Connecticut (ESPN‘s home turf), employed Thomson‘s VIPER FilmStream camera system and a full 4:4:4 HD post workflow designed by Creative Bridge and Technicolor. A mobile truck dubbed Technicolor Creative Bridge‘s Mobile Digital Lab and Theatre (MDLT) included Globalstor‘s ExtremeStor DI workstation, a PNY provided Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 SDI card, and Assimilate‘s SCRATCH.

The MDLT truck–first introduced at NAB 2006–enabled 4:4:4 data capture from the Viper‘s storage, full 1920 X 1080 projection, real-time color correction, real-time HD-SDI playback, HD and SD down conversion, and direct to disk file transfers.

Also on tap: Technicolor‘s Digital Printer Lights system, which allows cinematographers and directors to create and apply looks on set.

Jeff Olm, Creative Bridge‘s colorist, worked with The Bronx is Burning‘s Director Jeremiah Chechik, 1st Unit D.P. Doug Koch CSC, and 2nd Unit DP David Stump ASC to create a series of “looks” (Lookup Tables or LUTs) in pre-production. Some three days of test footage shooting resulted in 50 different looks the director could choose among. Afterwards, colorist Olm started his sessions with camera reports and slate frame info; the real-time color correction chops of the Nvidia Quadro/Scratch combo allowed him to quickly prep fully tweaked dailies for viewing. Using this approach, budgeted color correction time was said to be cut by half.