LONDON — 3D production company Can Communicate has been busy recently, working on Alice Cooper's infamous fright show, “The Night of Fear” and Sky3D's 10-part observational documentary, Safari Park Adventure. The company is making use of two Quantel Pablos, which share workflows via a GenePool. The studio also recently invested in Quantel’s Neo grading panel.
Safari Park Adventure was shot at Woburn Safari Park and follows the day-to-day activities of the park's keepers and animals. The series was shot on Sony P1s with Canon HJ22 lenses. More than 300 hours of footage was acquired for the 10-part documentary series.
"Safari Park Adventure was a huge challenge, particularly as we had to deliver the first six, one-hour episodes weekly, so we were working two systems 24/7,” explains production director David Wooster. “Our Pablos and Neo panel held up really well throughout the process. The key thing for us is that we couldn't afford a technical failure in the first phase, reliability was crucial in this project — there just wasn't time for problems! We had upgraded all of our systems to the latest software prior to doing all the fixing, which really helped. We could not have graded the series without the Neo panel and the overall quality of what we were able to produce in such a short time is something that we are very proud of.”
Wooster cites numerous Pablo features, including the ability to treat left and right eye clips independently. “We needed to be able to handle a manageable amount of data,” he explains, “so we used 100Mb per second for both offline and online, and due to costs we only had a limited recording capacity. Only the left eye was provided to the offline, so we needed to be able to conform the eyes independently using the EDL. We certainly wouldn't have been able to use Cineform clips, even at a lower resolution.”
Wooster says they also makes use of the Stereo Tab, which allows users to auto balance and fix all stereo clips in one tab. The Text Tab was also useful, allowing the operator to overlay text on a 3D clip, saving time.
The studio had just a week to online each episode in the series.
Currently, Can Communicate is in post production on two 3D productions: one, a co-production with Touch Productions about the human body, and the other for National Geographic.