American Cinematographer - February 2008 - 70

New York-based PostWorks recently ventured into Los Angeles, opening facilities in West L.A. (pictured) and Santa Clarita. PostWorks Comes to L.A. by Jon D. Witmer At the beginning of 2007, the New York facility PostWorks was in the early stages of planning an expansion into Los Angeles, and the discussions were taking a decidedly traditionalist turn. But then, Mike Doggett, who had been tapped to head the Los Angeles operation, brainstormed another idea with his team of developers. As PostWorks Los Angeles Senior Vice-President Marco Bario recalls, “They started asking themselves, ‘Why are we going to build something that already exists? Why don’t we build something that looks toward the future?’” Doggett’s colleagues at PostWorks New York agreed, and today, the construction of PostWorks Los Angeles/Orbit West is nearly complete. The expansion of the company, which offers high-end digital-imaging services to theatrical and broadcast clients, comprises three phases and involves sites in West Los Angeles and Santa Clarita. The first phase was completed in August 2007 and involved the initial build in the Tribeca West complex in West L.A. The second, scheduled for completion this month, focuses on the construction of a facility in Santa Clarita. The final phase, to be completed in April, will expand services and physical space at the West L.A. site. Bario and senior colorist Pankaj Bajpai recently led AC on a tour of the 70 February 2008 West L.A. facility, and during the visit, they emphasized the benefits of starting from scratch. “That was the draw for so many of us,” says Bario, who, along with Bajpai and Al Cleland, senior vice president and general manager, came to PostWorks from Technicolor Creative Services. Other hires include senior colorist Scott Ostrowsky, who will focus on library mastering in the Santa Clarita facility while Bajpai oversees the broadcast work in West Los Angeles; Jim Houston, senior vice president of imaging technology; Greg Ciaccio, vice president of technical operations; Jennifer Tellefsen, vice president of broadcast services; Jeff Quinn, vice president of engineering; and Joe Wolcott, chief engineer. “Had we decided to re-engineer something that already existed, it would have been impossible to have the flexibility we have.” “The market is awash with all kinds of great color-corrector and editorial boxes,” says Bajpai, “but what matters from a client’s perspective is how well they all play together. We focus on making the workflow as efficient as possible, and to do that, we’re addressing the bottlenecks we’ve all been experiencing for years.” During phase one, the facility’s first color-correction suite and digitalpicture-conforming room went online. For color correction, Bajpai utilizes Autodesk Lustre, running the software on a 16-node Incinerator. The nodes (or processing engines) of the Incinerator all remain live while Bajpai works. “It’s a lot of horsepower, and you can selectively choose how many processors you’re going to utilize for one thing or another,” Bajpai explains. “For example, I can allot eight nodes for background rendering, or I can use all 16 for doing complicated color-processing. Either way, with 16 processors working all the time, it’s blazing fast!” Eschewing any semblance of a tape-based workflow, both the colorcorrection suite and the conforming room, which utilizes Autodesk Smoke, access the facility’s 100-plus TB SAN, which stores as DPX files all of the footage associated with the projects in the pipeline. According to Bajpai, “We decided we were going to bring in true nonlinear access to color correction. For instance, in Smoke, you can assemble three different versions of your cut, but you’re always working with the same media; you’re just telling that media to sort itself in a certain way and then creating metadata — at no point are we wiping out old media.” Bajpai can store almost countless versions of a project because the original media pool never changes; the different cuts are stored as metadata information, not duplicate files of the footage. “Another luxury is having fullblown DI [digital intermediate] tools available to you in anything you’re coloring,” continues Bajpai. “We want the Images courtesy of PostWorks Los Angeles.

American Cinematographer - February 2008

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