ASSIMILATE, the industry’s leading provider of DI and dailies digital workflow tools, today announced that Mikros Image has purchased a company-wide site license for ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH® finishing software and SCRATCH Lab®, an advanced production and VFX dailies tool. Headquartered in Paris, France, and with subsidiaries in Belgium (2) and Montreal, Mikros Image is a major player in the post-production market, offering high-end post services for films, commercials, TV episodes, corporate communications, and video games. Mikros Image also has a partnership with the LA post-production and visual effects company Eight VFX to develop a series of common projects for commercials and feature films. The goal of the SCRATCH purchase is for Mikros Image to standardize all their facilities – including their post-production teams and freelancers – on a streamlined and efficient data workflow throughout its production and post-production processes, from dailies to data management, conform, color grading, compositing, finishing and final output to a variety of formats. http://www.mikrosimage.eu
Mikros Image faces the challenge of producing a huge number of projects simultaneously. Over the years, the company had used a variety of systems for film and digital projects. To support their high-growth ventures for feature film, commercials and TV episodics, they realized that standardizing and streamlining processes with powerful and robust end-to-end workflow tools would enable consistent and higher quality results and faster time to market, all while saving time, reducing maintenance costs, and lowering training costs for personnel.
Mathieu Leclercq, head of digital cinema at Mikros Image, stated, “We closely reviewed and considered several workflow tools on the market. With a robust data toolset, SCRATCH emerged as one of the most complete dailies-to-finishing solution, as well as the most cost effective, with a superior price/performance ratio. Additionally many competitive products required costly proprietary hardware, which contributes to high cost of maintenance, whereas SCRATCH runs on high-performance off-the-shelf computers running on Windows and the Mac OS X.”
Leclercq added, “SCRATCH helps in boosting our productivity in many ways. For example, the construct-based architecture makes it an excellent tool for dailies. It’s easy to organize a huge number of clips day-in and day-out for different projects and using different systems. It’s the ideal tool for transcoding all native camera files to DPX and EXR files in the needed color-space and with high resolution. We’re able to manage numerous projects through the pipeline, along with all the CDLs or LUTs, and maintain a high standard of color consistency throughout the entire workflow. It also integrates easily with our other tools, like Lustre for color grading. The new cloud tools are a standout, which for us, makes SCRATCH the system of the future.”
Mikros Image Project Achievements
2010: “Logorama” won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
2012: Mikros Image won two Visual Effect Society Awards for the ads “Canal + the Bear” and “Dior J’adore”.
2012: Mikros Image announced the creation of its own animation studio, starting with the full CG feature film ”Asterix: The Land of the Gods.”
2014: For the Amazing Evian Baby & Me Spider Man commercial, Mikros Image created and animated the CG baby in his sweet-stitched costume and synchronized all his movements with those of the super hero.
SCRATCH Site Licenses Go Global
Mikros Image joins the ranks of a long list of post-production companies and studios that echo the same high level of satisfaction with the SCRATCH site license: Digital Factory (France),
D-Facto Motion GmbH (Germany), Bavaria Films (Germany), Technicolor (France), Storm Post (Netherlands/Belgium), Cinesite (UK/Canada), Prasad / Efx (India), Cinecolor & Metrovision (Argentina), Cinecolor (Mexico), Cinecolor (Colombia), Cinecolor (Brazil), Cine Chromatix KG (Germany), Universal Post (USA), and Digital Sandbox (USA) to name a few. To learn more about how a site license can benefit your facility, contact Nacho Mazzini, VP Worldwide Sales at ASSIMILATE, contact Nacho via email.
SCRATCH Digital Workflow Tools
ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH, a “post house in a box” – from dailies, to conform, color grading, compositing, through to finishing – and SCRATCH Lab, a robust dailies or VFX review digital pipeline, deliver the industry’s most comprehensive toolset for digital cinema and episodic television 2D and 3D productions. Both products support multiple formats, including ARRI RAW, Sony F5/55/65 and Cyber Shot s700, Phantom, Panasonic Varicam 4K, Canon C300/C500, as well as enhanced support for RED cameras including the new EPIC DRAGON at all resolutions. SCRATCH enables mixing and matching of any camera format, resolution or color space (including ACES) on the same timeline – and play back in real-time. All versions of SCRATCH and Lab software, running on OS X version 10.7.5 or higher and Windows 7/8, feature SDI and 3G output via AJA Kona 3G graphics cards, Blackmagic Decklink, Bluefish Epoch i/o cards, fast dailies rendering, and improved metadata and time-code handling. For the latest feature film and TV credits, visit www.assimilateinc.com
About ASSIMILATE
ASSIMILATE is the premier provider of digital workflow and post-production tools that have proven essential to the successful creation of thousands of studio and independent features, television shows, music videos and corporate video productions. The company’s SCRATCH products, running on Windows and OS X, are the heartbeat of today’s most demanding digital post-production and dailies workflows for 2D and stereo 3D productions. They equip directors, DPs, on-set professionals and artists with the state-of-the-art, intuitive, data-centric solutions they need to meet the continual challenges of increased creativity and productivity amid ever-shrinking budgets. ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH data-centric DI system, is the most comprehensive, end-to-end cinema and broadcast imaging tool for conform, versioning, color grading, playback, compositing and finishing for nearly all popular digital workflows, including, RED, ARRI, Sony F65 and F55, Canon 5D, Phantom, GoPro and many more. SCRATCH Lab delivers a comprehensive toolset for the review, versioning, color correction, conform and output of on-set or VFX dailies. ASSIMILATE is a privately held company, with headquarters in Santa Clara, California, USA, and markets its products worldwide via a global reseller network. To learn more, visit www.assimilateinc.com.
