On Thursday, I went with Øyvind to Rushes to watch the telecine of some material for a commercial. We were leaving a meeting and he asked me if I wanted to come along, since he was going directly there, and I hadn’t actually seen a transfer done before.

It was pretty interesting, but maybe simpler than you think. The hundred thousand dollar Da Vinci unit they use to color correct doesn’t really do much more than what a high-speced PC workstation could do, as far as I could see, and the interface was the typical early nineties “pro visual software” interface, a la Shake, a large screen with lots of buttons and widgets, no windows you can move, and things in tabs. And lots and lots of sliders. The big console the Da Vinci uses is certainly cool, and I’m told you can get those for normal PCs too, but they’re still overpriced (in the 10k dollar range, which is ridiculous for 4 large trackballs and a bunch of buttons and knobs). Brings me back to my rants about why good free software could blow this whole thing wide open.

The telecine itself is a pretty cool piece of gear, though, even though it’s also relatively simple, and overpriced, like much else in movie production. But the results look good (and this was a transfer to SD, even).

All in all, an interesting experience. I hung around the Da Vinci operator and picked up a bit about how the interface worked, and prodded him on how to get the curves right (years of still image correction experience pay off). The best part was the included free food and drinks, though. They make really good sandwiches.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 1:18 am and is filed under Mexploitation adventures, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.