A year on from acquiring their first Baselight FOUR system, Dublin post house Windmill Lane has purchased a second Baselight colour grading system. Upcoming features currently being edited at the facility include Neil Jordan’s ‘Ondine’, Conor McPherson’s ‘The Eclipse’ and Ian Fitzgibbon’s ‘Perriers Bounty’.
A new Baselight HD with GPU has been installed by the facility as part of the plan to replace the existing console in their Spirit suite as well as upgrading the existing Baselight FOUR with GPU fast processors, which has increased the speed of the two machines. A number of projects have already been completed on Baselight including ‘A Film With Me In It’ for Parallel Films, the award winning ‘Five Minutes Of Heaven’ for German director Oliver Hirschspeigel and ‘Single Handed 3’ for Touchpaper TV.
Tim Morris, Director of Facilities at Windmill Lane, explains: “Commercially, it’s been extremely positive. Installation of the first system enabled us to create a new service for features and drama that we didn’t offer before – in context DI grading. It also gave us a competitive advantage from a technology stand point and increasingly we have found that our Commercial clients wanted their projects graded on Baselight.”
“We can now provide clients with a more efficient and streamlined workflow. Both systems can work together via Baselight’s ‘cloud architecture’ – this features opens up Baselight’s high speed, local storage to third party systems (and other Baselight systems) on the same network. Connected on the cloud network is the facility’s existing Spirit HD, with direct control from the Baselight of all telecine features, including noise reduction. This enables the colourist to replicate a traditional film-to-tape process, as well as exploiting the creative opportunities that a software colour corrector brings.”
Windmill Lane has also worked on a number of projects shot on the RED ONE/RED camera and found Baselight to be well suited to this type of data acquisition where files can be debayered real-time, conformed and rendered out as MXF for Avid offline. When onlining, conformed RED files can then be graded for the final programme output.
“Making the change and replacing our linear suite has given us more flexibility from start to finish. Our colourists are happier as the systems provide a greater toolset and ease of use without compromising their creativity,” stated Morris.
