Post Magazine

March 2009 Issue

Post production veterans Bob Festa, Clark Muller and Darby Walker opened Santa Monica's NewHat here last year with an all-British array of color grading systems, including Pandora Platinum systems and, recently, a Filmlight Baselight Four. Richard Alcala came on board at NewHat as senior engineer last August.

The shop ( www.newhat.tv ) specializes in color correction for TV commercials. Big-budget spots for big national advertisers. The automakers alone that NewHat has done color work for say a lot: Alfa Romeo, Dodge Ram, Jeep, Land Rover, Lexus, Lincoln and Mazda. It's all digits, of course, and that means they need storage.

Besides pushing digits around the shop, Alcala says, it's about "doing it in realtime, full resolution and in multiple streams, and that’s what the DataDirect SAN allows us to do."

For film-acquired commercials, and NewHat clients tend to be film people, NewHat scans on two Spirit 4K DataCines. But they work in 2K -- for now. The 2K workflow on the DataDirect Networks 300TB xSTREAMScaler SAN "allows us to have three rooms running simultaneously, playing back off the storage without any dropped frames. They can essentially be coloring, be playing back and previewing the shot; changing the color and previewing the shot, coming off the same centralized storage without affecting each other."

Their work being TV spots, NewHat colorists work on their own separate projects in a nonlinear fashion. "We scan full-ap 35mm negative at full 2K resolution and now we have the full image that, when you bring it into the color corrector, we can pan, push in, we can tilt up and down and frame it the way we want."