Facility to include five Teranex Express standards and frame rate converters, as well as number of other Blackmagic Design infrastructure products, including the Smart Videohub, for a complete Ultra HD pipeline
Blackmagic Design today announced that Freakworks, an award winning post production company, has rebuilt its entire Edinburgh post facility to include five Teranex Express standards and frame rate converters, as well as number of other Blackmagic Design infrastructure products, including the Smart Videohub, for a complete Ultra HD pipeline.
Triggered by the need to future proof the growing studio, creating the cutting edge facility involved a year of work replacing everything down to the bays in the master control room (MCR) and re networking an entire building, replacing over 20 kilometers of cable runs. “What we tried to create was an end to end 4K environment,“ said CEO and creative director at Freakworks, Hamish Allison. “A problem many facility houses have is that they are constantly battling the need to upgrade their systems incrementally, as new and better hardware becomes available - you very rarely get the chance to start afresh. We started again from scratch.”
The rebuild involved the installation of three new edit suites, featuring two Smart Videohub 20 x 20 video routers for 4K MCR routing, eleven Mini Converters SDI to HDMI 4K, four SmartScope Duo 4K dual rack monitors for MCR and edit suite broadcast scopes, and three UltraStudio 4K Thunderbolt based capture and playback hardware, as well as the five Teranex Express standards converters. Even in suite routing is now available to editors at Freakworks, who can patch signals automatically using iPads running the Videohub Software Control.
“When we began planning the new facility, the only way to down convert 4K to HD SDI was to use the Teranex Express, so we bought five. We’ve got three in edit suites all together, down converting to two scopes and an SD reference monitor. It’s a live feed from the suite, so if you’re editing in 4K in the suite with your scopes next to you, you have live feeds of the pictures you’re working with, in 4K or converted to HD via the Teranex Express.”
Most commercial work at Freakworks is now mastered in 4K thanks to the upgrade, and clients requiring HD delivery see increased resolution gains from the down converted 4K material. “Of course, another advantage is that we’re really impressing a client the moment they step in to the suite. They see all the screens are 4K and the content looks better, every detail of the images is on show,” added Allison.
“Blackmagic Design is now at the backbone of everything we do. All the routing is Blackmagic, all the monitoring is going through Blackmagic products at some point. We quickly realized it was only Blackmagic that had all the 4K infrastructure that we needed, and, because they’re so affordable, it means we can easily swap them out for improvements in the future without compromising on quality now.”
About Blackmagic Design
Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com.