cineSync on a Journey with Meteor

Monday, 11 February 2008

Rising Sun Research announced today that Montreal's Meteor Studios employed its cineSync remote review and approval tools and cineSpace color management to streamline workflow and keep quality consistent during visual effects creation for the highly-anticipated 3-D movie, Journey 3D. The movie, from Walden Media and Walt Disney Pictures, is an updated take on the classic Jules Verne story, where a geologist and his son travel to the center of the Earth and discover an unknown world. Starring Brendan Fraser and shot in live action with landscapes & creatures created using HD, photo-real 3-D technology, the ambitious stereoscopic picture comes to theaters in 3-D in summer 2008.

Meteor, the lead VFX house on the project, was chartered with creating complete virtual environment, creature shots and water simulations. The studio worked with Quebec-based Hybride to create virtual seamless environments for specific shots and sequences. While the VFX work was concentrated in Quebec, post-production moved between Montreal, Vancouver, and Los Angeles, which required the VFX and post teams to perform daily remote reviews of both the mono (master eye) and stereoscopic views.

Meteor employed cineSync as its main review tool for mono viewing sessions. They prepared every review session by building QuickTime movies and uploading them to an FTP site using cineSync's Organize Playlist/Set Internet Location feature for last-minute additions. During online sessions clients were able to indicate areas of the image with cineSync's drawing tools, drawing and writing on-screen in real-time synch with all review participants. At the end of each session, all on-screen notes and comments were saved and transferred in the "VFX notes" section of the cineSync shots tracker, allowing artists to address in a precise way the client's comments. Meteor also employed cineSync reviews for its internal teams, giving in-house artists precise visual representations of the VFX supervisor's comments and feedback, and saving production and rendering time.

By contrast, reviews of the stereoscopic images, which were held in 2k projected screening rooms at both Meteor and the client site due to the need for a large format display, were run without the benefit of cineSync, instead using telephone or online iChat calls to link the rooms.

Radu Vintila, Technology Director at Meteor Studios, said, "The information stream in the stereo sessions was far less effective. It was difficult to correlate comments with the actual image projected on the screen. We had to make sure that first, we were actually looking at the same image and second, that we defined exactly the screen area we were referring to. We quickly found out that drawing on the screen in cineSync, as we could in the mono reviews, is far more efficient than explaining that we should all look at the jagged edge of the rock in the lower third right side of the screen".

A new cineSync offering, cineSync Pro, which includes stereoscopic support, will be released commercially in early 2008.

To keep color consistent across creation and reviews, Meteor employed cineSpace equalEyes in all color-critical departments (textures, lighting, compositing, viewing stations), profiling and adjusting CRT monitors regularly to insure color uniformity. They also used cineCube to create 1-D LUTs for the artists and a 709 profile to emulate projection color space.

Jeremy Pollard, VP of Sales at Rising Sun Research noted, "With remote, multi-location workflows absolutely the norm now, the precise translation of images and color between VFX artists, post teams, and clients is critical. Our goal is to remove every opportunity for miscommunication or misrepresentation and ensure that the director's vision and the artists' execution of that vision are presented and understood as they are intended".

The full article can be read at Digital Producer

The official movie site for Journey 3D is here