Olympian effort

Post, Oct, 2004

TORONTO -- Beevision Productions (www.beevision.com), here, recently completed post work on a 12-minute high definition presentation being shown in the city's interactive Olympic Entertainment facility. Produced by Team Adrenaline, The Calling is comprised of archival Olympic footage shot on 35mm, 16mm, NTSC, PAL and 1080i HD from NHK Japan.

More than 50 hours of film footage was transferred to HD in the 23.98 frame rate using the Algolith plug-in for Apple Shake. Online and color correction was performed using Apple Final Cut Pro. The program's :50 open was created using Shake and consists of various athletes, rotoscoped and composited with animation.

Beevision's Paul Hart directed the project, which was edited by George Saturnino. More than 1,000 edits make up the final cut, which follows Jack Lenz's emotional score and features no narration. The score includes world beat musicians, recorded in Toronto, and a 70-piece orchestra, recorded in Bratislava, Slovakia. Kevin Doyle served as engineer. Tracks were recorded into Digidesign Pro Tools.

The final, complete with 2,500 sound effects, was delivered as an 11-channel, 10.1 surround mix, supervised by Steve Barden of Sounddogs and IMAX mixer Peter Harper.

The final MPEG file was rendered on the same dual 2.0GHz G5 it was edited on, using Heuris MPEG Pro D-Cinema software and has a bitrate of more than 70MB/s.