Dublin-based post house Windmill Lane has upgraded its colour grading department with a new FilmLight infrastructure. Windmill Lane was the first facility in Ireland to choose Baselight.
The facility has replaced its FilmLight hardware and now has two Baselight TWO grading systems running on generation 5 hardware, with the latest software release.
Windmill Lane has based its entire post workflow around Baselight, using it for ingest – including direct from a Spirit telecine – and for its file processing as well as its grading capabilities. Final conforms and deliverables are run in Baselight, allowing colour decisions to be made at any stage of the pipeline.
Alongside the new upgrades, Windmill Lane is also working with FilmLight on future developments. It is a test partner for the Baselight Dailies service for near-set grading, as well as the Baselight Editions plugins for Avid and Nuke.
The company recently worked with Russian DoP, Mikhail Krichman, and director Andrey Zvyagintsev on finishing to the 4K Leviathan. Other recent features graded on Baselight at Windmill Lane include Miss Julie (Liv Ullmann), Young Ones (Jake Paltrow), Dare to be Wild (Vivienne De Courcy), and Let Us Prey (Brian O’Malley).
“With the new Baselight systems we can tackle any codec or camera format without workarounds,” said Dave Hughes, Windmill Lane’s head of grading and DI. “The machines are infinitely quicker than they were before, too. As well as giving our colourists free rein, it means that our overnight throughput, creating dailies for Avid, has quadrupled.
“I went away on holiday while the upgrades were being installed, and I came back to a very happy department, telling me all about the improvements and speed increases. It makes our workload easier and more efficient.”
“Windmill Lane has been grading on Baselight since 2007, and they have been great friends to FilmLight,” said Wolfgang Lempp, co-founder of FilmLight. “The quality of their work is undeniable, and they really know what they want from their grading tools. It is great for us to be able to talk to them about future enhancements and know we are getting the opinions of a talented team of creative editors, colourists, animators and visual effects and finishing artists, which complement their experienced production department.”
