New Zealand’s Park Road Post has confirmed that the majority of the DI and stereo 3D work for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit will be performed on SGO’s Mistika. The facility currently hosts six Mistika 4K workstations. Weta Digital, who has taken on the visual effects for both films, also has a Mistika workstation. Mistika plays a major role in the workflow process of all Park Road stereoscopic work, including rushes preparation, stereo adjustment, colour grading and EDL conforms for screening. Mistika operator based at Park Road, Francisco Cubas said: “This is such an exciting time, Park Road is an amazing facility and we are working on one of the most important motion pictures being filmed right now in the world; and Mistika and SGO are part of it.”
Dave Hollingsworth, head of picture at Park Road, added: “We had some very specific and extremely difficult challenges to overcome leading up to the beginning of The Hobbit principal photography. After seeing the Mistika last year and hearing about SGO and the development team, we decided to go down a path of using the Mistika as the hub for our new digital rushes workflow.
“There was no other system that could deal with turning around stereoscopic Red Epic high frame rate material in the timeframe and with the quality that we needed. Working very closely with SGO alongside developing our own proprietary software we have achieved something that is quite incredible.”
Jackson is shooting The Hobbit at twice the normal frame rate at 48 frames per second and with a 270 degree shutter angle to reduce the motion blur commonly associated with fast pans, a movement and effect exacerbated in 3D.
www.parkroadpost.co.nz
www.sgo.es
