[23 March 2015]
Leading London facility expands capacity to meet demand from movies and television drama
Top London creative post-house, LipSync Post, has opened its third grading suite, incorporating a Baselight grading system and Blackboard control panel from FilmLight. The suite has been added to meet the facility’s ever-growing demand for top-end finishing.
Located in the heart of London’s production community, LipSync Post prides itself on having the most creative staff, supported by the most adaptable, productive technology. For more than 10 years that technology has included high-performance colour grading with Baselight. All three grading suites are configured for 2k finishing for television and for digital cinema, using high-resolution projectors.
LipSync Post recently provided full post-production services for Wolf Hall, the hugely successful 6x60min drama adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s multi-award-winning historical fiction novels. The programme began broadcasting in January on BBC TWO and stars Damian Lewis (Homeland) as Henry VIII opposite Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell.
Freelance colourist Adam Inglis, who graded the show, commented, “Wolf Hall was a true collaborative work with director Peter Kosminsky and DoP Gavin Finney. With Baselight it was a very smooth process as the system is quick, precise, clean, intuitive and adjustable. It was particularly useful on this project because you can really precisely manipulate the shadows – and there are a lot of shadows in Wolf Hall.”
Senior colorist at LipSync, Stuart Fyvie, recently graded director Alan Rickman’s new feature film staring Kate Winslet, A Little Chaos, and Film4’s Hyena. He commented, “Our customers recognise Baselight as the benchmark product – we don’t have to convince them. They want to know that nothing is going to compromise the grade, and they know that Baselight is the best choice.
“For us, we know that FilmLight is really strong in colour science, and that is vital to the way that cinema is made and distributed now,” added Fyvie. “Baselight is great at dealing with all the raw camera formats and FilmLight’s R&D team is very quick to update the system when new codecs emerge. It means we get the best out of the raw files no matter how they were captured – you can really save shots without putting a ton of noise and grain on top.”
The Baselight systems sit on a shared network for seamless content exchange with other workstations to provide finishing and deliverables. As well as Baselight grading, LipSync relies on FilmLight’s Truelight colour management to ensure consistency of images between rooms and across deliverables, and a Northlight scanner for elements that arrive on film.
