A year on from acquiring their first Baselight FOUR system, Windmill Lane Ltd, the largest post-production house in Ireland, has purchased a second Baselight colour grading system. The company, who have a diverse portfolio and receive work for many feature films, broadcast and commercials, have installed a new Baselight HD with GPU as part of its plan to replace their old grading suite. The company have also upgraded their existing Baselight FOUR with GPU, which has phenomenally increased the speed of the two machines.
Choosing the second system was ‘a good decision’ for the company. “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 our Commercial clients wanted their projects graded on Baselight,” commented Tim Morris, Director of Facilities for Windmill Lane Ltd.
Windmill Lane can also 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 primary colour correction and 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.
The company 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. Files can be debayered real-time, conformed and rendered out as MXF for Avid offline and when it comes to online, 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.
Windmill Lane have already completed a number of projects on Baselight including two features—they are currently working on a third feature. They have also completed over twenty commercials and many hours of long-form TV drama.
Contact – Deepa Parbhoo ([email protected]) +44 20 7292 0400
