THE MAGAZINE FOR MEDIA PROFESSIONALS WORKING IN FILM, AUDIO, VIDEO, MOTION GRAPHICS, IMAGING AND DESIGN

MORE SIGNAL, LESS NOISE

CREATIVECOW.NET

Special Edition

New Dimensions

In Cross-Platform Power & Productivity

with HP Workstations

By Russell Lasson, Color Mill

Salt Lake City, Utah

and the Ocula plug-in, along with

ASSIMILATE Scratch, we feel like we
can do the same kinds of things.
They were really intrigued,
and after a test shoot, they were
completely convinced. We created
an 11-minute segment to show to
potential distributors, who told us
it was the best 3D theyd seen. We
knew that we could make it happen,
even on the $10 million budget the
film settled on.
SHOOTING
A 3D film doesnt have to be 3D
from beginning to end. We decided
that the interviews and stunt setups would work fine in 2D. Having
the audience watch them in 2D also
let their eyes relax so that, when we
got to the stunts in 3D, we could
push further than we might have
otherwise. The money we saved by
shooting part of the film in 2D was
also put into making the experience
of the 3D stunts even better.
After telling RED about the
project, Godfrey Entertainment
was able to get six of the first EPIC
cameras that werent going to Peter
Jackson and James Cameron. The
higher resolution of the EPICs offered us more flexibility to scale and
reposition the shots, and their ability to shoot 96 frames per second
gave us more control over the timing of the shots, including gorgeous
slo-mo. We also needed something
that was a lot smaller than the RED
ONEs just in order to be manageable in the field.
There were certainly a lot of
technical things to figure out. These
were essentially beta rigs when we
got them, but looking back, theres
not another camera we would have
chosen.
The majority of the film was
shot at 96 frames a second, which
gave us a chance to make awesome
moments from these stunts last
as long as possible, and really let
people explore the image
but
heres what it meant in post. With
two cameras in a rig, shooting at 96

JUMP!

Nitro Circus 3Ds stylistic leap in 3D production used RED EPICs shooting 96 fps, for up to 4TB
of files a day. They relied on HP workstations to deliver the film on time and on budget.

itro Circus The Movie 3D may be one of the craziest films youll ever see. A
lot of people describe it as X Games meets Jackass, but instead of just doing silly, stupid stunts, these are athletes. Theyre as acrobatic as a circus could
be. It just happens to be a circus where sometimes things go wrong.
Color Mill, which specializes in color grading, 3D mastering and Digital
Cinema Package creation, had already cut its teeth on many feature films as
well as commercials, TV series and IMAX projects. One of our more high profile jobs was designing the digital workflow for the film 127 Hours. We also
backed up all their data, provided dailies, set up all their editors on Avid Media Composer, made sure all the metadata was handled properly, and interfaced with Technicolor U.K.

Russell Lasson

Nitro Circus is a series that began airing on MTV in 2009. When its
producers, Godfrey Entertainment,
decided to make a stereoscopic 3D
film, a lot of people in the industry
told them that they needed at least
$20 million to shoot a 3D feature,
and that no one outside Los Angeles could pull off the post. We wanted to prove them wrong.
We had already made a conscious decision to explore 3D, and
were big fans of research and development. We used RED Ones we
owned, got a side-by-side rig, and
we quickly learned some of the
basic rules in 3D. We also experimented with editing and finishing
workflows. Our advance preparation gave us a lot of confidence that
when somebody approached us
with a 3D job, wed be ready.
To our credit, we did not oversell our capabilities. We said, You
know, Quantel Pablos 3D capabilities are awesome. Its designed to
do everything very, very quickly.
We might not be able to do it as
fast, but with The Foundrys NUKE

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

Above, setting up 3D rigs with

RED EPIC cameras. Left, the Nitro
Circus 3D poster. Title graphic,
one the films remarkable stunts.
Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

frames per second, thats eight times the footage created by a single camera shooting 24 fps. So for every minute you roll, you wind up with eight minutes of footage!
On a single day, we generated four and half terabytes of footage. Moving that type of data is very, very
difficult, especially when youre talking about a film with
a $10 million budget.

CROSS-PLATFORM WORKFLOWS
Our 3D workflow started with taking the EPIC R3D files
through Scratch, to double-check sync and adjust basic
color parameters. We rendered them out to DPX, and
then used NUKE and Ocula for complete alignment between right and left eye, as well as color matching between the eyes. This was on the HP Z800 workstation
and two Mac Pros. In the end, we returned to Scratch on
the HP Z800 for a final conform, color grading and 3D
adjustments and convergence.
From the beginning, we had been an all-Mac shop,
starting with Mac editorial on Final Cut Pro. Weve got
a lot invested into it, and it has worked really well for
us. As we got more and more into color correction, we
purchased Scratch three years ago. It was then Windowsonly, but we went ahead anyway, because there just was
not anything anywhere close to comparable power on
a Mac. Even when Scratch became available on Mac, we
didnt see any workflow advantages, and it was simply
not as fast or powerful.
We ran NUKE on both Windows and Mac for Nitro
Circus 3D, but when it came down to the finishing work
Below, HP Z800 Workstation and Mac Pro working
together. Lower right, a RED EPIC 3D rig on location.

and taking advantage of the power on the best graphics

cards out there, Windows was the right choice for us.
Several features made the HP Z800 workstation in
particular the right decision for us. First, we needed a
lot of PCI express card slots. The Mac is glamorous but it
only gives you four slots. Our system consists of an NVIDIA Quadro 6000, the NVIDIA SDI card, two RED Rocket
cards, an eSATA/USB 3.0 card and an ATTO R680 RAID
adapter. That tallies up to six PCIe cards in one computer!
Its made a huge difference for us to have the topof-the-line NVIDIA Quadro 6000 (which the Mac does
not support), especially when grading 4K or 3D material
in real-time. We also connected the HP Z800 with a 48
TB Maxx Digital RAID and 48 GB of RAM as well, which is
more than the Mac Pro supports. For a project like Nitro
Circus The Movie 3D, this combination has really freed us
creatively to allow us to try new things.
Maybe the best feature of the Z800 is how HP has
taken extreme measures to make it rock-solid stable. The
Z800 has been completely reliable for us. HP has really
tuned this system to make sure that all the components
are optimized to work at peak performance. They even
have their own application that monitors program and
system efficiency to help us get the most power out of
the system. Being stable is something we value tremendously, and HP has provided that for us.
THE CROSS-PLATFORM FUTURE
We believe that cross-platform facilities are the future.
Weve been a Mac shop for a long time and FCP 7 was
a great step. But anyone transitioning from FCP into
whatever is next should consider a Windows platform to
replace a Mac. A 64-bit Windows 7 along with HP Z800
has been a really great combination for us, much more
powerful than what the top-of-the-line Mac can offer us.
Theres a possibility that in three or four years, well be
all Windows and, when we expand, we would definitely
buy HP workstations again.
Nitro Circus 3D was released theatrically on August
8, and we couldnt be prouder of our work on it. When
Godfrey Entertainment came to us, we felt that we could
step up and execute a full 3D workflow, and we did.
We proved that a 3D feature doesnt have to cost
$20 million, and that there are post houses outside of Los
Angeles like Color Mill that have the knowledge,
expertise and tools to finish a 3D feature.

Posting 250 Episodes Per Year Of New Zealands #1 Show

No Time To Waste!
By Dylan Reeve, Post Supervisor & Finishing Editor
South Pacific Pictures

hortland Street is a show thats difficult to put into perspective for anyone outside New Zealand. It airs five nights a week in prime time on the
countrys most watched channel, TV 2, and has an immense social influence:
something like 95% of people over 14 have watched the show at some point,
and it regularly achieves a 50 share. The shows reach is unmatched.
Its produced by South Pacific Pictures, best known internationally for
Whale Rider, and who also produce many other shows and features but
nothing else on the scale of five nights a week. At the beginning of 2011, we
took all post in-house, where I serve as both Post Production Supervisor and
finishing editor.

The show is shot in a 3-camera studio style, and we use an

EditShare Geevs multi-channel recorder to capture the line cut and
up to three iso channels, directly to
Avid DNxHD 185. We make 250 episodes a year in 49 weeks, just over
five episodes a week, every week.
Shooting and post generally runs about eight weeks ahead
of air, on a bit of a complicated
schedule. Heres how one episode
works over a two-week cycle. It
begins with two days of location
shooting, Monday and Wednesday
in what we could call Week One.
The studio shoot for that episode
begins on Tuesday of Week Two.
On the Monday of Week Two we
Left, (L-R) Nurse Nicole Miller
(Sally Martin), Dr. Chris Warner
(Michael Galvin) and Dr. Gabrielle Jacobs (Virginie Le Brun).
Title graphic: TK Samuels (Ben
Mitchell) carrying Hunter McKay
(Lee Donoghue) from a car accident on a 90-minute Shortland
Street special.

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

EDITING & FINISHING

We have two editors, and since the editing of each episode spans two weeks, they alternate: one is editing,
and the other is working with the director to finalize the
previous block. Both of them are working with HP Z400
workstations running Avid Media Composer 5, using the
Matrox MXO Mini for monitoring.
We also have an assistant who manages assets, and
because our location shooting is done on P2, imports it
and transcodes it to DNxHD.

begin to edit location footage from Week One into, and

on Tuesdays we start cutting that days studio footage.
By Friday of Week Two, we are typically cutting footage
shot the same morning.
In Week Three (the second edit week), the director
does a cut on Monday and Tuesday, then Wednesday is
a screening with the producers. We do a producers cut
on Thursday, and were done. We treat the episodes in
blocks of five, creating, in essence, a feature film every
week: 115 to 117 minutes of finished television, every
week, 49 weeks a year.
POST WORKFLOW
We offline on Avid Media Composer, and always have,
even when we were sending the show out for finishing.
When Southland Street started over 20 years ago, they
worked tape-to-tape, but since going nonlinear, Avid has
always been the answer. There was actually never any
question about it. In New Zealand, there havent been
any strongly adopted alternatives in television drama.
Our broadcast deliverable is still HDCAM tape, but
when we decided to bring the finishing in-house, we
also decided not to get a tape deck. Instead, we deliver
an Avid sequence to the same post house that does our
audio mix. They marry the picture and sound onto a tape
for us.
I also archive a file-based copy of it all. The EditShare
system includes Ark, their archival system. I make a DNxHD 185 mixdown of everything at the end of the process
that gets its own workspace on the server, and which
then gets backed up onto LTO tapes. We also archive a
consolidated version of everything we make, and we archive every second of footage we shoot around two
terabytes per week. We have a LOT of LTO tapes!

Shooting a locker room scene with TK Samuels (Ben

Mitchell).
Above, Dylan Reeve and Avid Symphony running on
the HP Z800 workstation.

She also cuts the recaps that go at the beginning

of every episode and picks up the editing slack as need
be, running Media Composer 5 on a third Z400. The final

Below, Shortland Streets control room.

EditShare Geevs

step in her part of an episode is to prepare the sequences to pass to me for the Avid Symphony grade.
In addition to my role as Post Production Supervisor,
I also function as the finishing editor, running Symphony
6 on an HP Z800. I use Symphony to remove booms and
shadows, minor VFX refinements, screen replacements,
paint-outs and general fixes along with the grade itself.
Working with the line cut of the controlled studio
environment isnt hard, but location footage can be
challenging. I would very much struggle to complete
this volume of work without Symphony color correction
features like relational grading abilities and the direct intimeline grading.
Were quite happy with the set-up we have with
software and hardware. Its easy enough now creating
50 weeks of TV a year that nothing will make harder.
The only question I have now is what is going to make
it easier or better.
A file-based workflow has done a lot to help us
manage post simply and with immediacy. We can get a
call from the control room, Weve just shot something
that were worried about. Can you take a look? And we
look RIGHT THEN, because the files are available to us
while the crew are still shooting.
THE FUTURE OF NLES AND WORKSTATIONS
Earlier this year though I also worked on a small, lower
budget show for SPP, Golden, which I graded in DaVinci
Resolve. (I have DaVinci Resolve on the same system
with Symphony and the Avid Artist panel, but I havent
found a workflow using Resolve with Symphony yet that
handles the volume of footage we shoot, in the time I
have. I have a day a day and a half at most to grade
an episode. )
When we started to use Resolve, we did briefly
look at the Mac Pro, but it really wasnt a realistic option. I wasnt particularly impressed with the specs, and
couldnt justify investing the money in a workstation
platform that wasnt up to date. To be honest, Im skeptical about the future of the Mac Pro in general, and I
wouldnt invest in it until I know where its going.
The approach Ive taken to workstations instead is
that I want to buy something that I know will work, that
I dont have to worry about, and that I know that Avid
recommends. Thats why I have been using HP workstations almost exclusively. Im even still getting value from
our retired HP xw workstations.
When Apple neglected to upgrade the Mac Pro, for
me the future of workstations became only HP. Its not
that HP is the only company making workstations, but
of the things Ive used to do this job, Apple and HP provided the products. Apple doesnt seem to want to do
that anymore, but HP does. Ive been very happy with HP
workstations, and they clearly want to continue making
them for this market.

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

By Terence Curren, AlphaDogs Editorial

Burbank, California

Two of the models wearing creations from Project Runway.

AlphaDogs Editorial:
A Cross Platform House
How adding HP workstations to a previously all-Mac shop has made
better business sense for one of Burbanks premiere post houses.

hen I founded AlphaDogs Editorial in 2002, it was

because I saw that technological trends made
it possible for producers and editors to buy their own
equipment and open their own facilities. We focused
on providing the best technology, with an attention to
personal service, and its been a very successful formula.
Were on our fourth season of Bravos Project Runway and work on a spin-off, All Stars of the Runway. We
recently started working on mun2s I Love Jenni, a reality TV show following Hispanic singer Jenni Rivera, and
My Shopping Addiction for the Oxygen Network. Weve
done editorial, audio, graphics and finishing work for
indie features, commercials, TV shows and more from
20th Century Fox, BET, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, DreamWorks, Paramount, PBS,
Showtime, Warner Bros., and many other networks,
channels and studios.
Because were attuned to technology trends, weve
prided ourselves on staying ahead of the curve, from our

Every Apple platform was closed because Steve Jobs wanted to control
the user experience. That worked for the consumer market quite nicely. The
Media & Entertainment industry is tiny compared to the consumer market,
and we werent getting what we needed: more slots for cards, more drives,
more RAM, and flexibility to go much further by tinkering to customize the
system.
HP workstations also let me get all the horsepower I need by adding the
latest NVIDIA cards to upgrade to the most current system from Avid or DaVinci Resolve, and NVIDIAs most powerful graphics technology, which Mac
doesnt support. And its easy to work with them. I dont even need a screwdriver to change out or add a PCI card or hard drive. Simplicity adds up in our
universe. I get that with the HP Z820, without sacrificing power.
Online/finishing editor Herrianne Catolos working on Project Runway,
using Avid Symphony on an HP Z820 workstation.

A CROSS PLATFORM HOUSE

AlphaDogs Editorial is still a cross
platform house. The graphics room
is all Mac, using Adobe products.
Some editors still want to work
on Macs, and with Avid and Adobe
products, you can go Mac or PC. The
two audio suites are currently Mac,
but when I upgrade, Ill be installing
HP workstations. In the meantime,
the finishing suites are already primarily HP workstations.
Im not knocking Apple, but
their approach just doesnt work for
the M&E market anymore. We need
more flexible, larger hardware systems, and thats what HP provides
us.

early adoption of HD to, more recently, file-based workflows. When Apples Final Cut Pro just began to gain in
popularity in the media & entertainment business, we
were one of only three facilities in Los Angeles Plaster
City Post and DigitalFilm Tree were the other two that
offered a workflow for it.
For a long time, I was a big Mac fan, and our facility
relied on the Apple platform. However, when Avid came
out with the Symphony, it was PC only. I had to buy a PC
and get comfortable with it. A couple of years later, when
Avid offered a Mac version of Symphony, it became possible to have Symphony and FCP on the same computer,
which was compelling. To make a room versatile so as to
hold both systems held a certain charm, but I stuck with
keeping Symphony on a PC.
I began to see a pattern with Apple products, and I
didnt have a warm and fuzzy feeling about it. I saw that
everyone would wait and wait for the new Mac Pro, and
when it came, there was really nothing new about it.

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

My Z820 also has seven hard

drive slots built in, compared to four
in a Mac, and supports eight times
as much RAM.
SYMPHONY AND SECURITY
I first used HP workstations because
of Avid, which worked closely with
HP to ensure that Avid Symphony
worked seamlessly. HP engineers
work with Avid long before new
products ship to make sure that
performance gives professional customers the reliability they need.
We are now building our entire
infrastructure around HP workstations. If I get an HP system that Avid
has approved, I know itll work with
Avids equipment and if theres a
bug, Avid will be able to figure it out
right away, because of that close
professional relationship.
Of course theres always the
option to build my own PC workstations, but, from an operating standpoint, if I have a day of downtime,
that costs me much more than the
difference in price of building my
own computer versus buying an HP.
HP also has a great warranty
service; their workstations are supported like the professional products they are. In the ten years Ive
been using HP products, and having nine rooms running on them,
Ive only had to replace two motherboards in all that time, and that was
years ago but when they went
down, HP sent someone out to replace them the next day.

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

By Shane Hurlbut, ASC, Hurlbut Visuals

Los Angeles, California

Shooting On The Cutting Edge

me, this monitor rocks. He wasnt kidding.

Never before have I been so impressed with the visual accuracy of a display. What you see with the DreamColor is what you get.
This is huge for me. I am not a big histogram guy. I
go with my eye and not some graph developed for still
photography that means absolutely nothing when you
are shooting HD. If you expose your histogram in four of
the five fields, which is what they say is recommended,
youll be overexposing your image and making it look
like video very quickly.
Its all about riding the fine line of starving the
CMOS chip of light, and giving it just enough so that the
footage doesnt look underexposed. Its a balance that
turns this platform from an HD video capture device to a
Digital Film capture device.
Using the DreamColor Display has become like
looking through an eye piece on a Panavision 35mm
camera for me. Instead of using a light meter for exposure and contrast, Im doing it off of the DreamColor. I
have never gone to the color correction bay and seen
something that I hadnt seen when I was on the set. It
has given me confidence as a cinematographer working

Shane Hurlbuts pioneering digital cinematography has helped change the industry. Hes now transforming his own workflow with HP DreamColor displays and the 17-inch HP EliteBook Mobile Workstation.

hings have been cracking!

Last summer, I shot a Boeing commercial campaign
made up of six spots. The job started on May 23, and I
ended up finishing it on August 23. Ive never been on
a commercial shoot that lasted eight weeks! It was like
shooting a feature film!
We shot with several cameras: the ARRI Alexa, and
three Canon cameras: the EOS C500, EOS-1D C and EOS
C300. I used multiple formats to showcase the best characteristics of each camera. I also wanted to be ready for
all of the shooting environments we worked in, so I had
the Alexa on the Steadicam, and the C500 on the Technocrane.
When we shot a lot of day exteriors and factory interiors in Seattle, I used the Alexa because I knew this

10

camera would handle the extremes we would be putting

ourselves into. When we shot in flight simulators and
very, very tight places, under wings and inside wings, I
brought the Canon 1D C out, the 4K DSLR thats perfect
for these tight spaces.
To get a more documentary feel for all the veteran
and community service based spots, I used the C300. Im
also using the high sensitivity of that sensor for a night
shot and gold light and other difficult situations.
CAMERA MONITORING WITH DREAMCOLOR
The HP DreamColor LP2480zx Professional Display was
my lighting monitor on set for the Boeing shoot, and for
most of my other projects.
I was introduced to the HP DreamColor Display on
Act of Valor, which was my first digitally captured film.
(The 18 films Id shot before that had all been on film.)
When I began working with Bandito Brothers on Act
of Valor, Banditos Mike McCarthy brought the DreamColor Display from their color correction bay to have on
set with us. It was a computer monitor with a little stand
for your desk! I asked, Mike, what is this? He said, Trust

within the limited latitude of HDSLRs.

The same is true for monitoring much wider latitude shooting. For example, I shot The Ticket, a short film
for Canon to showcase its new 4K DSLR, the Canon EOS1D C, and because the DreamColor has billions of colors,
I knew that it could be my eye into the 4K colorspace.
As soon as I saw what the DreamColor Display could
do on Act of Valor, I ripped the little stand off the bottom and crafted mounts so that it could be mounted on
dollies, c-stands, and cases to use on location. No matter
how badly I beat it up, the DreamColor Display holds its
calibration for 4000 hours. It gives me a lot of security to
know that when I yank that thing out, that Ill be good
to go.

In the title image, Shane Hurlbut at work on a series

of spots for El Pollo Loco, shooting with a Canon EOS
C300 camera in the Letus Master Cinema Camera Series rig that he designed. At left, Shane monitoring
shooting with an HP DreamColor Display mounted
into a travel case for on-set use.

HP ELITEBOOK MOBILE WORKSTATION WITH 17

DREAMCOLOR DISPLAY
I also love the new kick-ass 17-inch HP EliteBook 8770w
Mobile Workstation.
The first thing that caught my attention was the 17inch DreamColor Display the same display Id already
been using with complete confidence, with the same bil-

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

lion-plus colors, but on a laptop. Just like the standalone

DreamColor Display, it can be calibrated to a variety of
color spaces: sRGB, Rec. 601, Rec. 709, Adobe RGB, and
DCI-P3 Emulation.
The power on this thing is crazy, too. Real-time playback of massive files, short render times, easy transfers.
Were able to download all the ARRI Alexa and Canon
C300 footage and transcode it as well as color correct it,
all right on location.
Connectivity is another great feature of the Mobile Workstation. It has eSATA, an ExpressCard card slot,
FireWire, USB 3.0, SDHC, and the ability to quickly swap
internal 2.5 hard drives. CompactFlash, SxS cards, SDHC,
you name it, this laptop can quickly import the footage.
Then back it up to an internal raid, send it out to an external hard drive, or burn it to a Blu-ray. Absolute redundancy is critical with handling the digital negative on set
and HP mobile workstations make this so much easier.
These HP mobile workstations are also rugged
enough to meet military standards for drop, vibration,
dust, temperature and altitude, which is good for the
kind of run and gun shooting in remote locations that
I often do.
Next up, Ill be shooting Need for Speed, based on
the videogame, with director Scotty Waugh who did
Act of Valor, and Steven Spielberg producing for DreamWorks. Scotty and I have already had a conversation
about cameras. Were planning on shooting anamorphic, and our main camera will be the ARRI Alexa Plus
4:3. Im going with the Codex Onboard M Recorder so we
can record ARRIRAW.
Well also have the Canon 1D C 4K and the Canon
C500, and, yes, Ill be using the standalone DreamColor
Display for all the Canon 1D C shooting.
The 17-inch HP EliteBook 8770w Mobile Workstation with the DreamColor Display has allowed us to reshape our workflow. It provides a new immediacy with
watching dailies, editing, and coloring in the field.
Bottom line, its a powerful tool with a small footprint that gives us immediate feedback, and lets us get
to work while were still in the field.

Above left, a scene from The Ticket. Below, Shane on

location with the 17-inch HP EliteBook 8770w Mobile
Workstation, revealing just a few of its many paths
for handling data.

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

11

With a BAFTA for audio in hand, Bang Post Production has a

new game afoot for picture post in Wales.

couple of weeks, we hope to bring in the control panel, and are looking forward for using the four trackballs for Resolves new LOG grading but we
have been very happy with the real-time performance of our Z800.
Im using four NVIDIA GTX680 cards, the 4 gig versions, and with 4.5K

Solving the Mystery

of Getting Ahead
By Glenn Collict, Bang Post Production
Cardiff, Wales

ve been working with Bang Post Production, which is

primarily a sound post facility in Cardiff, Wales. Bang
won a BAFTA for our work on the BBCs Sherlock, and were
also nominated for an Emmy for our work on Sherlock.
There arent a lot of high-end finishing facilities in
Cardiff that can do anything above 8-bit uncompressed
HD, and none that offer soup-to-nuts for offline, online,
grading, and audio for high-end TV and feature films. We
wanted to be the one that did. Since Bang already does
the audio for high-end TV and feature films, we thought
wed build a picture suite to be able to handle 4K grad-

Glenn Collict

ing, 4K finishing and minor visual effects work.

Thats where Ive come in, to help build that suite
and do the online editing and color grading. Its really
been a big success so far! Weve already got a number of
feature films in house. One of the films in-house is Vigilance, which is constructed out of what is supposed to be
found footage much like Chronicle.
Vigilance was shot on RED One with the MX sensor, so its 4.5K footage. We typically convert RED files
to DPX. We have some ARRI Alexa projects underway,
and we typically leave those in ARRIRAW. We even have
another film coming up that was shot on film, at 35mm.
I cant wait! Im a fan of film. Whatever the format, film
or digital, weve established workflows that can handle
high-resolution footage without any difficulty.

A BIG WIN
Bang traveled to Los Angeles in September for the Primetime Emmys
and while we didnt win an Emmy,
being a very small company out in
Cardiff, working on such high profile projects as Sherlock and Doctor
Who is already a big win.
Upgrading Bang Post to a picture facility, based on the reliability
and speed we get with the HP Z800
as well as our other tools, I feel good
about our chances going forward to
achieve high quality work and the
recognition that will bring.

PICTURE AND SOUND WORKFLOW

Key to building the kind of suite we needed to do this
work was opting for the HP Z800 Workstation instead of
a Mac. If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have
said, No, Im going to work on a Mac. Really, I was quite
closed-minded before I started working at companies
that had PCs. I found out pretty quickly that Avid Media
Composer ran much more quickly on a PC, as does Blackmagic Designs DaVinci Resolve.
When we were building out the picture side of our
business, we decided to go with a really powerful system, rather than relying on the control panel. In the next

12

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

DPX, Im getting loads of nodes,

with full real-time performance. I
feel like Im not even pushing the
system anywhere close to its maximum.
Im also really excited about
the IIF/ACES workflow. I find it fascinating. I really want to dive into it
and use it for absolutely everything.
I had a chance to do just that,
as well, using some 4.5K footage
from a RED camera, which I converted to Open EXR and input into
the Resolve. I pushed that footage
as much as I could blacks, mids
and whites and couldnt clip it. I
couldnt crush it. It was amazing.
I should mention that we also
have Autodesk Smoke 2013 on Mac,
and Im very happy with our workflow tying Smoke on Mac, Pro Tools
on Mac, and Resolve and Media
Composer on PC.
Looking forward, we plan
on upgrading our storage set-up,
which is now separate for Resolve
and Smoke, and replace it with some
very fast shared storage. With the
real-time playback we get from the
HP Z800, itll be nice to have storage
connectivity that can match, but for
now, we couldnt be happier with
how all of it works together.

Above, a current project of Bang

Post Productions is Doctor Who,
played by Matt Smith seen here
in the episode Asylum of the
Daleks, courtesy BBC. Left, from
L-R, Doug Sinclair, Paul McFadden, Will Everett and Jon Joyce in
one of Bangs Pro Tools suites.
Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity

13

Larger than 4K?

Larger
Than Life!
By Walter Soyka, Keen Live
Wappingers Falls, New York

Keen Lives Walter Soyka regularly works with files twice the size of EPICs 4.5K. And how
about a 120-foot video wall at 14,700 x 1200? Thats why he needs all the power he can get.

started my career in corporate editorial as a staff editor before going freelance and building my business
around Macs running Final Cut Pro. Over the course of a
few years, I developed finishing skills and my work gradually shifted to graphics and animation.
Now I focus on designing and producing presentation and motion graphics, and I have a niche specialty
in large-format work. Sometimes this means multiple
screens, sometimes this means custom-shaped LED tile
configurations, sometimes this means curved projection
surfaces, and sometimes this means blended projection,
but it always means working beyond HD, typically easily
twice the resolution of the RED EPICs 4.5K.
Im currently working on a couple pieces of content
for an installation with a 120-foot video wall running a
brand-new display technology with a total system resolution of 14,200 x 1200. Its a refresh of an existing video
wall, replacing a big blended projection system with a
new tiled display system. Weve reformatted and scaled
existing content for the new wall, and weve created two
new abstract animations. You can see the actual scale of
the animations below!
A one minute-long animation that I just completed

The actual scale of one of Walters recent projects!

14

for the video wall generated 972 GB (not a typo) of multipass image sequences. Thats a bit over 16 GB/s. Retrieving a single frame meant reading over 500 MB off disk.
Every little bit of performance counted.
On the display side, we use a single computer with
multiple graphics outputs or a network of computers
outputting visuals in perfect synchronization to fill that
canvas. These systems are built around specialized PConly media server applications like Dataton WATCHOUT.
As a result, Ive had PCs in the office for years for
some tasks, but due to my history with Final Cut Pro, I
have always done my creative work on Mac workstations. I would create all my content on my Macs, then
move the renders over to PCs for programming the displays.
The launch of FCPX gave me the opportunity to reevaluate my workflow. I realized that the software packages I was working with most Adobes Creative Suite
and MAXONs CINEMA 4D are cross-platform. Final
Cut Pro 7 was the only thing I was using that I absolutely
needed a Mac for, and when it reached the end of its life
as we knew it, I would eventually need to replace FCP7
with another NLE like Premiere Pro anyway.

I knew from ten years of experience that Macs offered great build quality, good performance, stability, security and ease of use. I wasnt sure if I
could expect all this from a PC. Last year, HP sent me a Z800 Workstation to
try alongside my Mac Pro and the Z800 changed my mind about what was
practical with a PC. I wound up buying four more HP workstations to go with
the Z800.
Theres a common misperception among Mac users that PCs are unreliable, too hard to administer or too unpleasant to use. That may have been
true years ago, and it may be true today with low-quality hardware, but in
my experience, it hasnt been true at all with the Z800 and thats why Im
happy to talk about how adding HP machines has helped my business. I want
other Mac users like me to know that you can use a PC for everyday creative
work, that PCs are more artist-friendly than they may think, and that HPs
Z-series are great workstations that open-minded Mac-based shops should
consider.
Switching to a cross-platform creative workflow, I was impressed with
how quickly I was able to hit the ground running. I set aside a day to install
and configure all my software and plugins, and then I jumped right in and

started a paying job on it. I had my

Mac Pro under my desk next to the
HP Z800 in case of disaster, but I
didnt need it. I was surprised at just
how smooth the transition was.
The biggest adjustment working on a PC has been learning to use
my pinky finger on the Control key
instead of my thumb on the Command key for keyboard shortcuts,
and now I can switch back and forth
between Macs and PCs easily.
HPs build quality is outstanding. The Z-series are solid machines
with clean internals and tool-less
chassis, more room for internal expansion than my Mac Pro, an integrated carrying handle and an optional rack mounting kit. Running
Windows 7 has been a great experience on HPs hardware, offering me
the same stability and security I was
used to on OS X, and really surprising me with how easy its been to
configure and use compared with
my experience on Windows XP.
I am always looking for performance, and the HP Z-series delivers.
HP offers a really broad range of
configurations, so you can spec the
best system for your needs. There
are high-performance options like
the new Intel E5 Xeon processors
or high-end NVIDIA graphics cards
that simply arent available or supported on the Mac platform.
What does that mean for me
in practical terms? I looked at published CINEBENCH scores, which
are computed by measuring render
Above left, the same Adobe After
Effects project running on Walters Z800 workstation (with the
30 HP ZR30 LCD display, the first
10-bit display with over 1 billion
colors) and his MacBook Pro.
Left, a visual comparison between the Mac Pro on left (3 card
slots, 4 drive bays, 32 GB RAM)
and HP Z800 workstation on
right (7 card slots, 7 drive bays,
512 GB RAM).

performance of a real-world CINEMA 4D scene. The top

Z800 from 2011 outperformed the top 2010 Mac Pro by
about 18%; the top Z820 of today outperforms the current Mac Pro (which Apple has not updated to Intels new
Sandy Bridge architecture) by almost 65%!
Integration with my existing infrastructure and
workflows was critical too. Ive got a big investment in
Apple hardware, with eight Macs in use in my studio, and
I wasnt sure if I was ready to drop Apple-only software
like Final Cut Pro altogether.
Using cross-platform software from Adobe and
MAXON, I can move a project from a Mac to a PC and
back again seamlessly. I didnt need to dump my
entire Apple hardware investment. I just added the HP
Z800, bought additional licenses of the software I was
already using, and kept right on working.
Ive since started buying additional HP computer
for distributed renders. Its still more of a render garden
than a render farm at this point, but while Apple has
been slow to release new professional-grade computers,
Im confident that HP will continue building the kinds of
machines that my business needs to grow.
Adding HP workstations to my little operation has
been a big help. I can get the performance I need on reliable workstations from a vendor I can trust, and I can use
them alongside my existing Mac systems. If you need a
workstation, HPs Z-series is worth a look.

Walter Soykas render garden, with the four

HP workstations he bought to complement
his Z800.

Learn More!
HP Z820 Workstations

Ultimate Performance for Ultimate Projects.

HP DreamColor Displays
Billion-Color Possibilities.

HP Mobile Workstations
Power to Perform.

16

Creative COW Magazine / HP Special Edition: New Dimensions in Power & Productivity