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Reader SurveyRolling HD Pipeline
Jul 26, 2005 12:09 PM, By Michael Goldman
Dutchman John de Haas is a former musician who decided a couple of years ago that he wanted to make movies. “After working through the whole digital revolution in sound, I thought it would be a small step to make movies digitally, and to work entirely in HD,” he explains.
As a first step in his digital filmmaking plan, de Haas opened an all-HD production facility in Breda, Holland, earlier this year. He called his facility Pentamagik. But simultaneously, Pentamagik also built a mobile, all-HD production/postproduction system tailor-made for location production and editing of high-resolution TV and feature film material.
The company simply calls the system a “high-definition dedicated van.” In reality, it’s a full, tapeless HD production suite on wheels, chock full of expensive, high-end HD gizmos networked together.
The company announced earlier this month that it was seeking a patent on the unique configuration, and at press time, was shooting and producing a new demo reel with the system. Following that, de Haas says, the plan is to produce 13 episodes of a Dutch television program called Legends with the system. Then it will be used to create an independent feature film produced by de Haas called The Painting—a project currently in pre-production.
At its core, the system consists of a Thomson Viper FilmStream camera system (but it’s compatible with any 4:4:4 camera system, according to de Haas), with all imagery recorded directly to a Quantel eQ editing/effects/color grading system. The system is configured with 240 minutes of RGB 4:4:4 HD RAID storage, a Sony BVM F24 24in. HD monitor, several smaller HD viewing screens for immediate playback, a Yamaha DM1000 audio mixing board with speakers, and a variety of other HD tools, such as waveform monitors, time-synch generators, routers, and so forth. It’s all packaged in a Mercedes 814 D Ecoliner van, designed to permit shooting and editing to happen simultaneously on location.
“It’s a little like a (live broadcast) production vehicle in a way, but for feature films and things. To my surprise, nobody had thought of this yet, which is why we have asked for a patent on (the system),” says de Haas. He adds that Pentamagik is planning to show the vehicle at NAB 2006. “The equipment itself is expensive to buy, but the thing is, it’s not expensive to use. So that is how we are planning on making this affordable—a one-time capital investment that we can amortize over many projects, always working in the highest-resolution HD, direct to hard drives. We have lots of storage but can easily swap out more drives as needed, and the whole thing docks with our main facility. We can plug (the truck) in, and download everything we have shot or edited.
"Since we think HD is the savior of the film industry, this kind of an approach can speed up production, and therefore, in the long run, not only save money, but also make productions easier to finance to begin with, as well as keeping them within budget and keeping more people working. Therefore, we felt it made sense to make this investment and prove it works with our own projects, like The Painting.”
De Haas adds that Pentamagik expects to start configuring two more HD production vans in the next couple of months, in order to put them to work on multiple projects simultaneously.
“We also think this would be a perfect workflow for a major Hollywood production, so hopefully, after we show the system at NAB next year, people will start to see how this can reduce their budget, while still allowing them to work with high-end HD imagery.”
