LOS ANGELES - Boutique post house Solvent Dreams (www.solventdreams.com) has opened a digital intermediate suite in an effort to make affordable, realtime color grading available to independent features shot on HD or film. The new suite is powered by Final Touch HD by Silicon Color, a software tool selected by colorist Yasu Tsuji and visual effect supervisor David Davidson.
"We chose Final Touch for its seamless integration with Final Cut Pro, Blackmagic support, and because Final Touch will scale in realtime capabilities with the upcoming leaps due in graphic card technologies," Tsuji explains.
With 8 terabytes of high-speed, customized and removable RAID storage, Solvent Dreams' DI suite will be able to handle multiple HD features simultaneously. Monitoring is performed via an HDSDI output from a Blackmagic HD link to a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display, a Sony 23-inch evaluation monitor and a Sony Artisan for film evaluation. The suite outputs to any HD deck, including Panasonic D-5, for online mastering at the highest resolution.
Solvent Dreams, which specializes in visual effects, main titles, color, and offline/online editing for a large broadcast and film clients, is building a second suite and will add a full-resolution HD projector in the near future.
The company development its own process of making video look like film with its Magic Bullet software. The same process is integrated into the new suite to further enhance video-originated products, enabling filmmakers to color-correct and generate film looks in realtime. The studio believes it can provide all of the abilities of a da Vinci system, but at a more affordable rate.