Pepper spices up e-lab process - English Beat - Brief Article - Company Profile

Post, July, 2002 by Bob Pank

LONDON -- The post house Pepper in the Covent Garden area of London is thriving with record-breaking business. Founded in 1999 by colorist Vince Narduzzo as a bespoke telecine grading and transfer facility, it has rapidly expanded to offer a full range of post services, with work centered on broadcast programs and documentaries. Recent high profile productions include Man and Boy (BBC), Othello (LWT), The Way We Live Now (BBC) and The Naked Chef (Optomen Television Ltd for BBC TV). However, of late a new area has opened up in the form of feature films.

Pepper's growth from three to nearly 50 people has involved several steps into new areas. It scored a world first with a Super 16 Wetgate on their Cintel-Reality telecine and was one of the first in the UK with Avid's DS/HD. Shane Warden, senior editor, company director and DS artist, maintains strong ties with Avid as Pepper is a beta test site for DS. It was either inevitability or a natural progression that led to e-lab, (the electronic process that takes film negative through to a finished digital master).

HOTEL

Director Mike Figgis is known for his innovative style of production: Leaving Las Vegas was shot on Super 16 and Timecode gave you four films in one courtesy of a quad-split Today, Figgis is a keen user of digital technology and his latest feature Hotel (Red Mullet) was entirely shot on DVCam and made use of camera features such as Night Vision for the evening shots. Pepper was approached by Steve Harrow of Steeple Post Production Services (SPPS) to complete what was to be its first digital grading and titling of a feature via the e-lab route. Note that in this digital age it is still the people that count; Steeple chose Pepper because of senior colorist Chris Beeton's experience in video grading of features.

The material was conformed onto Digi Beta in Symphony in preparation for the tape-to-tape grading. Here Figgis had very definite ideas of how each scene should look. He notes, "In the early stages of post I downloaded stills from the original DVCam tapes to create publicity stills." As Figgis attended the grading session these stills were presented to Beeton displayed on Figgis's laptop as references for each scene. Beeton remarks, "That was great. I could match the look and we used to get through a [20-minute] reel a day, which was good for something as complicated as that." The complication was the addition of pan-and-scan work via an aspect ratio converter to allow for 1.85:1 presentation. Nonetheless all seven reels were completed at the same pace, day after day.

Warden, attended by Figgis, produced the titles in DS/HD working at SD in realtime. Once approved they were up-res'd to HD. With e-lab procedures still being quite new, the production company allowed two days for the SD-to-HD up-res but with the DH/DS translating and rescaling everything the full HD version was ready for scanning within one day.

Although Hotel's on-screen format includes quad-splits these were not conformed as such onto the graded Digi Beta master. Instead, the footage that made up the effect was sent as full-size material and the quad-split was created at Digital Film Labs (www.digitalfilmlab.com) during the transfer to film. Such a procedure minimizes quality loss by avoiding the squeeze down for the split before enlarging again for the big-screen transfer.

Beeton recalls, "This was our first encounter with the tape-to-film route and we were very aware of the contrast limits of video. But Mike knew exactly what he wanted and it was quite amazing what detail was actually in the dark areas. In the end, Hotel was a challenge but worth the result."

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE

It was Steeple again who asked Pepper to undertake the digital post for director Michael Winterbottom's feature film 24 Hour Party People (24 Hour Films Ltd./Revolution Films). This was tote the same...but different. The film documents the music and dance heritage of Manchester from late 1970s to the early 1990s and the birth of the world famous Hacienda dance club. Rather than depending only on newly-shot footage, there were various formats -- Super8, 16mm, DV, 35mm and videotapes (2-inch, 1-inch and Beta SP) -- some from the 1970s and '80s.

As with Hotel, Beeton graded the film for theatrical release using Pandora Pogle Platinum. This time the approach was to run trials to test the whole proposed process chain, which included tape-to-film transfers at Duboi in Paris. Such testing and experimentation continued throughout post production, which spread over a three-month period. Although the time lag between experiment and test results meant that other jobs intervened, the use of digital settings and recordings ensured that the grading results were always repeatable.

The grading succeeded in seamlessly matching the various film and tape stocks while also showing a subtle chronological progression through the film to match the particular period. The accuracy was such that Deluxe Laboratories produced the first show print with just 20 grading changes throughout the 98-minute feature.