Digital Vision case study

Author: Dennis Lennie

Published 1st October 2009


The Edit Store, based in London’s W1, is one of the last few independent facilities in the city. Spread across two buildings, the Edit Store provides many of the world’s leading broadcasters with offline, online, grading and audio dubbing facilities primarily for broadcast factual programmes. At the heart of its HD grading suite, introduced in 2008, sits Digital Vision’s comprehensive colour grading and finishing solution Film Master, with an additional full suite of DVO image enhancement options.
Since its arrival The Edit Store has used Film Master for a number of high profile grading, digital premastering and high definition online projects. Indiochine, a three-part HD production for Big Ape Media, is a major ‘in-colour’ series produced in conjunction with Discovery Asia. The programme tells the remarkable story of the people of South East Asia who have fought three wars over three decades to gain their freedom.
Aired in the spring, the series has been made entirely from never, or rarely seen, 35mm, 16mm and 8mm colour film footage, dating back seventy years, and transferred to 4:4:4 1080 HD. Digital Vision’s DVO toolset was instrumental in the restoration phase of the project, while grading and matching the wide variety of footage into a seamless, coherent whole was achieved using Film Master.

Ninety per centof the material was affected by motion artefacts; the challenge was to restore content only in its native frame rate. To achieve this, The Edit Store's team devised a unique workflow for the project enabling maximum flexibility for the producers. The restoration was carried out using the DVO toolset, enabling parameters to be tweaked on a shot by shot basis and then graded by Edit Store’s Senior Colourist, Mike Sanders, on the Film Master. Edit Store’s co founder Chris Rodmell explains, “Projects like Indiochine are both interesting and challenging because the colourist has to achieve a specific look with material shot on various formats. The client was impressed with the transformation of the damaged source material. Digital Vision’s software is streaks ahead in its abilities with stabilisation and clean up.”
The DVO options offer creatives more power and flexibility to enhance the images that they produce, with adaptive sharpening and sophisticated grain management. At the same time the automatic repair tools provide an extremely efficient method to restore damaged footage with defects being automatically detected and repaired with very little user intervention.
Digital Vision’s software solutions have been specifically designed to give film and video industry professionals the flexibility and quality in image enhancement tools and enable superior mastering results when delivering sources for encoding either for digital cinema, Blu-ray, IPTV or in the case of The Edit Store, broadcast.
Another restoration project that the facility graded and restored recently using Film Master and the DVO toolset is drama reconstruction High Seas Hero’s: Fighting Back Pirates, for Discovery USA. In April 2009, Somali pirates took the Captain of the Maersk Alabama - an American merchant ship - hostage. The programme tells the untold story of how the unarmed crew waged a desperate battle to outwit the pirates, keep control of their ship, and save their captain. The programme came to The Edit Store for finishing and again the Film Master and DVO toolset exceeded all expectations. Chris says, “Film Master has tremendous flexibility and control and it’s fast, which is exactly what our clients require.”
100 Years of the Girl Guides for ITV1 also received the Film Master and DVO treatment. This month, the Girl Guides celebrate their centenary. Narrated by Dominic West (The Wire), 100 Years of the Girl Guides delves into the movement's extraordinary archive and interviews a host of former Girl Guides from veterans to household names Kelly Holmes, Clare Short, Kate Silverton and Rhona Cameron. This project, like Indiochine,used archive material shot on various formats. The end look is a seamless production that maximises the flexibility and creativity of both DVO tools and Film Master.
The third recent high profile production graded by The Edit Store using Film Master is the much discussed The Duchess on the Estate. The two-part programme for ITV1, which aired in August, sees Sarah Ferguson, The Duchess of York, spend ten days on a Manchester housing estate to learn more about the problems of “broken Britain”. Chris concludes, “These projects have a running theme, they all have seamless picture quality. To take historical film footage that has sat in an archive for years and bring it back to life for future generations is incredible. We would not be able to achieve the results that we have without the Digital Vision platform.”

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