Post Blog 2009 November Sony Colorworks holds Open House

Sony Colorworks holds Open House

Posted By Barry Goch on November 19, 2009 12:00 am | Permalink

Sony hosted an open house at Stage 6 on the Sony lot in Culver City, CA, to showcase their new DI facility, Colorworks. Sony chose to partner with FilmLight and installed 3 BaseLight Eight, two BaseLight Four, and two BaseLight Assists for their color grading systems.

Chris Cookson, president technologies Sony Pictures, said that they built out the 14,000- square-foot facility with an eye toward a full digital pipeline with a high-speed digital backbone and access to 3.5 petabytes of storage. In addition to BaseLight, they have also partnered with IBM to provide storage. The facility depends on BaseLight's Truelight color management system.

Bob Baily, senior vice president Colorworks, started our tour in their I/O room. The room features Arri film recorders, a Spirit 4K and the only DFT Scanity scanner in the US that can scan pin-registered 4K at 17fps. They also have a Northlight scanner.

Next we saw the conform rooms powered by the BaseLight Assists. They also have a MTI Control Dailies system as well as an Autodesk Smoke for VFX work and PF Clean for dust busting.

The highlight of the tour was joining John Persichetti in his color bay and screening a portion of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs in 3D. He explained that he first makes a color pass on the 2D version, then he grades the 3D version. He noted that the 3D imagery needs to be adjusted for the light loss of the glasses and that the image shifts slightly green which needs to be corrected. He also demonstrated the BaseLight's ability to adjust the interocular distance to affect the depth perception of the image.

Adjacent to Colorworks is the Sony sound department where we were treated to a 5.1 demo in the fantastic Kim Novak theater.

Sony has created a filmmaker friendly, fantastic facility on the historic Sony lot. Perhaps during your next DI, you might bump into Vanna White in the Commissary.