NEW YORK - With its recent relocation from Manhattan's East Side to Times Square, Creative Group (www.creativegroup.tv) has significantly upgraded and expanded its studio services, including the addition of a high definition editing suite.
Creative Group's new space also features seven component digital editing suites, two Avid Symphonies, seven Discreet Flame/Smoke Systems, three Digidesign Pro Tools|HD 5.1 audio mixing theatres, and one animation motion control suite. The facility is capable of mastering to many formats.
In addition to adding more Flame/Smoke suites, the studio has also added Discreet's Backdraft station to manage all of the Discreet workflow, with each Smoke/Flame station having 2TB of storage.
The HD suite was built in large part to handle the immense workload coming in from client In Demand, which has two HD stations. The room is built around the Sony HDS-7000 linear editing switcher, Graham-Patten digital audio board, a Chyron Duet HD character generator and a Sony HDME-7000 dual-channel effects system.
Because of the pure volume of promos for In Demand, "linear editing is the only choice," says Joseph Avalone, president of Creative Group. "It's all about speed," he notes. "I think linear editing has a future with HD. It takes a long time to move all that data and as people do more and more HD work they're not going to have time to wait for all of that rendering. With linear, it's done as quickly as I am speaking."
The Sony HDS 7000 switcher handles 1080i and 24p editing. In the next year, Creative Group will build another HD room centered around the HDS-8000 multi-standard switcher that can handle any format.