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MillimeterAeon Re-Flux
Aug 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
When MTV and director Peter Chung decided to digitally remaster the entire Aeon Flux animated TV series for DVD release to coincide with next month's release of the live-action Aeon Flux feature, they turned to LA-based Chrominance and the process promoted by that company's founder, Theodore Kim. Kim proposed that remastering and scene-by-scene color-correction work for the 10 original episodes be done in a tapeless format, starting from the original camera negative. He suggested that Chrominance perform scene-by-scene color correction, re-editing, and additional visual effects creation, all in uncompressed HD, for the original 10 episodes of Aeon Flux and 10 additional shorts.
Top: An scene from the original Aeon Flux TV series before the application of a complex digital remastering process. Bottom: The new version of the scene, featuring extensive color correction and the addition of new visual effects.
Kim, who ended up producing the video portion of the DVD as well, says the undertaking first involved massive amounts of original footage, including camera negatives located in MTV vaults and Chung's personal archives. The Chrominance process involved telecining all that material through a Spirit 4k system at Modern VideoFilm (Glendale, Calif.), storing it on QuBit ST servers (from QuVis) via internal and external RAID drives, and backing it up on Sony AIT-2 tape drives. From there, the material was edited in uncompressed format in Final Cut Pro HD (v. 4.5) and color-corrected in FinalTouch HD software (version 1.0.7) from Silicon Color. Various effects were then created using After Effects (v. 6.5) and several plug-ins.
“We edited everything down to the equivalent of an of-f--line edit in the form of motion-JPEG captures at full HD resolution,” says Kim. “That gave us file sizes small enough to make dubs and send them to MTV to make sure we had the right material for each episode. Then, we started onlining everything, with an uncompressed entire episode on each [Apple dual 2.5GHz G5] workstation, making sure each edit was okay. After that, it was all transferred to our colorist.”
Kim explains that key elements of the pipeline that made the project efficient and financially viable were the QuBit servers working in concert with Final Cut Pro, as well as what he calls “impressive results” from the FinalTouch software.
“The QuBit servers are not cheap, but their efficiency and reliability — they don't have tape heads [that] wear out, for example — made them much more cost-effective than tape,” he explains. “Having them available around the clock at my home studio meant that we could call upon any of our telecined HD footage day or night at full, visually lossless quality. That same device was fine for backing up, archiving, and moving footage around at an affordable cost. The ability to have the QuBit servers work well with Final Cut Pro, which took a long time to research and develop, allowed my staff to use them without re-training. And the FinalTouch software let us get through every one of the 5,000 scenes doing primary and secondary color correction with mattes and other special effects.”
Kim adds that he strongly feels this kind of nonlinear, hard-disc-based, editing workflow could soon replace taped production for such projects. He also feels this basic approach would work well for a major feature film digital intermediate project.
