D4D Ingeniería Visual, based in Pamplona, Spain, is carving out a reputation across Europe as a leader in 3D stereoscopic production for a wide range of visual media, including features, TV commercials and documentaries, live events, and short films for national institutions. Along with advice and on-set supervision services, D4D also provides 3D stereo shooting equipment – rigs and aerial camera systems – and employs ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH® Digital Finishing Solution as the DI “power tool” for its production and post offerings.
D4D shot to prominence with its work on the forthcoming IMAX 3D production “Running With Bulls”, a unique view of the famous Pamplona fiesta. Since then, is has serviced Six Nations live rugby matches, produced and posted a film for Spain’s Museum of Paelentology and Dinosaurs, and is prepping for a documentary in South Africa and a new soap opera.
D4D’s managing director Salvador Puig, explains how SCRATCH fits into the company’s 3D stereo mix.
Power Tool: SCRATCH is the DI power tool. We use it during production as a review station – as it can play dual streams of HD SDI, to a 3D monitor or our 4m projection theatre – and in post to conform, grade and finish 3D stereo projects. When we bought SCRATCH 18 months ago, there were very few other systems that were capable of giving this kind of support. SCRATCH helps us to work with speed and efficiency, and remains the best solution, especially for price/quality.
Rapid: SCRATCH’s EDL conforming from Final Cut is always fast and accurate, and its ability to grade in real-time is amazing. We typically grade at full HD 1920 x 1080, with 2K DPX, TIFF, and TARGA files, or with the native 4K R3D files from the RED ONE camera. We normally try to work with and output DPX files, but obviously can output many other formats, such as QTs, depending on what the client wants.
Stereo Grading: We start by grading one of the eyes as a reference. Once the client is happy, it’s a straightforward process to copy the grade across to the other eye. However, if we need to do more precise grading, the beauty of SCRATCH SCAFFOLDS is that we can make a grading correction in one eye, and SCRATCH will duplicate this on the other eye automatically. If the position of a SCAFFOLD has been tracked or animated, we can adjust positioning globally by using the TRIM KEY option.
Convergence: Quite often we need to adjust the convergence point to finesse the focal point for viewers. We do this using SCRATCH’s SHOT FRAMING toolset, to slip the X and Y offset, or apply a rotation. To maintain a proper image, SCRATCH lets you scale the left- and right-eye images slightly so the horizontal and vertical offsets don’t create a black edge inside the master image frame.
Active & Passive: Because of the variety of projects we handle, we have passive and active viewing solutions that are both monitor and projector-based. We mainly work by feeding the SDI streams for left and right eyes from SCRATCH into a Christie projector in combination with active 3D glasses, and project on a standard screen. However, for projects like art or museum installations, we work with passive glasses on Eizo or Studio Penta HD2-Line monitors, feeding the SDI outputs to a stereo processor.
Projects: We made extensive use of SCRATCH during the production of “Running With Bulls” – to review and validate in 3D the material shot on RED ONE cameras – and also in post, for the real-time 4K post production workflow, including conform, color grading, and finishing. We worked on “The Lost Ravine”, a documentary about dinosaurs for the Museum of Paeleontology in La Rioja region, Spain. It’s 80% CG animation with the rest was created with actors on blue screen. Here we used SCRATCH to grade the film and to integrate the blue-screen comps with the CG material imported from 3DSMax as a TIFF file. We used SCRATCH to grade through mattes in the Alpha channel.
Special relationship: We have a great relationship with ASSIMILATE’s technical support staff. They’re always helpful, and happy to get on email or a conference call if we ever encounter any problems. Having SCRATCH has definitely helped us achieve a reputation as a leader in stereo.
