Spotlight on: The NVIDIA Quadro® FX 4500 SDI by PNY Technologies®
Creative Bridge Takes Production Editing On Location with Globalstor® Data
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After years of on-location digital film shooting and film production experience, the founders of Creative Bridge set out to
re-define post-production in the film and professional video industry. The concept had the potential to revolutionize the
creative process for producing digital content; Creative Bridge would take the production lab on location.
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"We built a mobile digital lab and theater (MDLT) in a truck 36 feet long and 10 feet high,"
explained Dan Lion, partner and co-founder of Creative Bridge. "We ingest the digital film
into our truck, on-set, and allow Cinematographers, Directors and Editors to review the data,
make edit decisions and color-correct circle takes, in a non-destructive fashion and output these
decisions, along with custom looks and the original 4:4:4 data, without leaving the location."
More filmmakers are shooting commercials, feature films or movies of the week with the high-end
digital data capture devices, such as those from Thomson®, Panavision®, and other high-end,
high-definition cameras. Each production involves an extensive amount of data to ingest, push,
pull and store.
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The Creative Bridge MDLT: the world's first Mobile
Digital lab and theater, pioneered by Creative
Bridge, Inc., to provide "pre-post" look
management and supervision in a controlled
environment at the production location.*
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"We get this performance directly by rendering in real-time in the
powerful GPU accelerators of the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 SDI by
PNY Technologies".
Brian Gaffney partner and co-founder of Creative Bridge.
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"We needed a really fast machine," recalled Lion, "one that could handle our unique workflow requirements and
integrate seamlessly to support our choice of data-centric/DI software, SCRATCH™ by ASSIMILATE. Globalstor's ExtremeStor DI
was the best solution we found to be able to handle that much data."In the past, if the director of photographer (DP) wanted,
for example, to add some red to a look, the color red might mean one thing to the DP and something totally different to the
telecine operator or the person in post production. Those types of mistakes cause expensive and unnecessary delays in
production. Utilizing Creative Bridge's MDLT, the digital file of the day's shoot is ingested into the ExtremeStor DI faster
than real time. The director and director of photography can then make color adjustments and edit decisions on site that will
carry throughout the project, without ever leaving the set.
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"We call it a 'pre-post',"explained Brian Gaffney, partner and co-founder of Creative Bridge. "In the past, the lines between film
production and film post production were very distinct, this process and the MDLT essentially bridges the
gap between production and post production enabling us to offer our clients an immediate look at their picture
and the opportunity to make on-the-spot creative decisions," Gaffney continued. "Yes, you're saving time and
the cost of the film transfer and the telecine costs and all that, but the real key is that you're going to have
more time to be creative, more time to tell your story."
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According to Gaffney, Creative Bridge researched several options before making their purchase decision, including
several types of servers and critical components ranging from graphic boards to video cards. "The key to providing
value for production is that we can develop looks on set and provide immediate feedback to the Director and DP.
There isn't time for making and rendering proxies. We need full resolution, real-time playback with primary and
secondary color corrections applied to create look up tables that will be applied to the raw DPX files during the final
transfer to film or finishing. We get this performance directly by rendering in real-time in the powerful GPU accelerators
of the NVIDIA Quadro® FX 4500 SDI by PNY Technologies®. With HD-SDI output on the graphic board, we can monitor these
display LUTs in our native 1920 x 1080 projector in our mobile lab while simultaneously driving our desktop and cinema
displays."
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For Creative Bridge, no other DI solution in the market was able to match the price/performance of the Globalstor ExtremeStor DI.
"Globalstor has put all the essentials into one complete package," said Gaffney. "Now, with the performance of Globalstor's
ExtremeStor DI solution combined with SCRATCH in our mobile rig, we can work with the DP to create that look and make
a digital set of numbers that will pass through to the final product so that the vision that the director sees early on,
is exactly what he gets at the back end."
Prior to the Creative Bridge mobile digital lab, the very best that a director and producer could expect was to receive
their dailies at the end of the day. The MDLT is now a part of a chain that's replacing the telecine, the lab and related
steps that take up valuable time and cost money. Instead of taking the production to a lab, processing that content overnight,
sending the project back for a viewing, then to a telecine to have the video transferred into data; directors now have the
option to eliminate that whole process.
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Photo left to right: Marker Karahadian, CEO and
President of Plus8digital, Brian Gaffney and
Dan Lion, Partners in Creative Bridge, Inc., and
Robert Glassenberg, VP sales & Marketing for Plus8digital.*
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"When we started building on the concept of a mobile digital lab, we were looking for something that
was very fast, very robust and that also offered us the ability to take in fibre channel, gigabit Ethernet,
as well as use the NVIDIA Quadro FX graphic boards and the BlueFish cards," recalled Gaffney. "With Globalstor,
all of those elements were already built in. For the price, performance and features, no other DI solution was
able to offer us what the Globalstor ExtremeStor DI did. It's a complete server solution."
The ExtremeStor-DI used by Creative Bridge features the latest NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 SDI by PNY Technologies and
the Bluefish444 HD LUST card, Windows® XP, Optional Fire Wire 800 and Optional Fibre Channel interfaces on a Dual
Xeon server.
The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 SDI by PNY Technologies® delivers uncompressed 12-bit HDSDI in 2K, HD or SD formats and
enables Creative Bridge to achieve the color accuracy and real-time rendering they require for color correction.
It also allows Creative Bridge to preview in real-time, the results of their editing and color grading on HD broadcast
monitors.
"What really got us was Globalstor's knowledge base of the computer industry the video application side, as well as the
support," confessed Gaffney. "Lots of venders that we talked to knew what their product did, but they didn't know how
to apply it. Globalstor understands. The features of the ExtremeStor DI were one reason to purchase, price was another,
but it was the support behind it, in this critical industry; that really impressed us."
The solution Globalstor recommended to Creative Bridge incorporates 24, 400GB hot-swappable SATA hard drives for up to 9.6TB
of local storage, providing Creative Bridge's clients with exceptional post-production capabilities. Paired with SCRATCH
and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 SDI by PNY Technologies graphic board, ExtremeStor-DI is a fault-tolerant high definition DI
solution providing real-time playback at HD and 2K resolutions as well as offering a complete end-to-end pipeline connecting
the filmmaking process from production through DI post production.
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About Creative Bridge, Inc. : |
Creative Bridge provides state of the art Mobile Digital Lab and Preview Theaters at location, as well
as HD equipment rental and creative support for the Digital Intermediate process.
www.creativebridgeinc.com.
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About Globalstor Data : |
An OEM with a full spectrum of hardware and software support, Globalstor offers a broad spectrum of broadcast and
video professional solutions including DVD-R Digital Dailies solutions, 2K/4K Digital Intermediate solutions, and
high-performance hi-definition video servers offering scaleable storage up to 9.6TB.
www.globalstor.com
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About ASSIMILATE : |
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ASSIMILATE™ is transforming post production with its SCRATCH™ Data-Centric Workflow Solution, the essential mix for
a resolution-independent pipeline. Along with data management, SCRATCH features a rich set of DI and post tools for
working in any combination of HD, SD, film (2K, 4K and beyond). ASSIMILATE is committed to empowering a broad spectrum
of creative and post professionals with state-of-the-art, easy-to-use, data-centric solutions that deliver optimal
price/performance. To learn more about SCRATCH and to access customer case studies, see www.assimilateinc.com
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