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KONA goes to work with an Egg

Dublin's Egg Post Production is using Aja's KONA 3 card to enable the 2k digital intermediate of the upcoming film 'Eden'. Directed by Declan Recks, 'Eden' is the first film in Ireland to be finished in 2k, writes Fergal Ringrose.

Dublin’s Egg Post Production is using Aja’s KONA 3 card to enable the 2k digital intermediate of the upcoming film ‘Eden’. Directed by Declan Recks, ‘Eden’ is the first film in Ireland to be finished in 2k, writes Fergal Ringrose.

The KONA 3 is a top-end uncompressed capture card for SD, HD, Dual Link HD and 2k for PCI Express (PCIe) Apple Mac Pro and G5 Power Mac systems, and was an integral part of the film’s Apple Final Cut Pro editing pipeline. Egg Post Production worked with reseller Tyrell CCT to devise a workflow consisting of Quad-core Mac Pro systems, Apple Final Cut Pro Studio 2, Apple Color with a KONA 3 card used for 2k deliverables and a second KONA LHe card for monitoring throughout the process.

‘Eden’ is the film adaptation of venerable Irish playwright Eugene O’Brien’s critically acclaimed play of the same name. The film is a portrait of husband and wife living in a Midlands town, Billy and Breda, as they approach their tenth anniversary. Grasping for excitement, Billy fantasises about a beautiful local young lady in town and the colour grading reflects these contrasting worlds with ordinary style and colour for the hero’s everyday life, and eye-popping looks for the extreme dream life when his imagination runs wild. The DI will be completed this summer, and the film will be released theatrically in early 2008.

“This is a relatively low budget feature and the traditional 2k route would have been out of the question for ‘Eden’. Keeping our workflow on the Mac and tapping the power of AJA KONA 3, we were able to offer the same quality in a cost-effective alternative,” said Eugene McCrystal, colourist and technical director of Egg Post Production.

‘Eden’ is the first 2k film to be finished in Ireland, and is being completed from end-to-end at Egg Post Production. The project, which was shot on 35mm 3perf, will be scanned in at 2k on a Thomson Spirit scanner, and after the offline, visual effects, colour grading and online are completed at Egg in 24fps, the project will be filmed out at Technicolor in London. Since the film was shot on 35mm 3perf, the 2k scans need to be cropped to 2.35:1 for viewing; in addition to the 2k cropping tool, the downstream keyer in KONA 3 allows Egg to do this very easily and in realtime.

“The KONA 3 card is proving to be invaluable on this project; it enables us to simultaneously monitor our work in HD while projecting 2k images which is quite a feat in Final Cut Pro. This dramatically simplifies our 2k workflow, and makes the process indistinguishable to our clients from the HD workflow that they’ve become accustomed to,” McCrystal continued.