Can Communicate postproduce con Pablo en 3D ‘Safari Park Adventure’

One of the European companies with the most experience in 3D productions, based in London, chooses Quantel Pablo in this documentary series for Sky3D.

Can Communicate, one of the European companies with the most experience in 3D productions, has chosen Pablo de Quantel for the new series that Sky3D will broadcast, Safari Park Adventure.

For this ambitious project, composed of ten stereoscopic chapters, Can Communicate has worked with dos Pablos, in a workflow environment with GenePool, together with its latest acquisition, the Neo grading panel.

Safari Park Adventure, recorded at Woburn Safari Park, follows the daily lives of the park's animals and rangers. The series has been captured with a rig made up of Sony HDC-P1 cameras together with Canon HJ22 optics, producing more than 300 hours of material.

David Wooster, production director of Can Communicate, has assured that “Safari Park Adventure
It's been quite a change, particularly because we had to deliver, for the first six months, one one-hour episode a week, so we're working on two systems 24 hours a day. Our Pablos and the Neo panel have helped us successfully carry out the entire process. The key for us is that we couldn't afford a technical failure in the first phase, so reliability was crucial in this project. This was not the time for problems! Without a doubt, we could not have carried out the color grading of the series without the Neo panel. The overall quality of what we were able to produce in such a short time is something we are very proud of. Our Quantel systems provide reliability and a good set of 3D tools that ensure we can offer great results.”

Complete projects

Wooster recognizes that "we have a fantastic team that has extensive experience in all types of 3D productions, live, advertising, promotional and documentaries. The most important thing is to aim for the highest possible quality in each project. We have our own 3D filming team and our own post-production facilities. This means that we can manage complete projects and guarantee a very high level of quality."

"Our Pablos have been absolute workhorses, working 24/7 for over four months. I couldn't have asked these systems to do more in Safari Adventure Park. Pablo has many characteristics that make him ideal for us. Firstly, having a dual-stream timeline that allows us to treat the left and right eye clips independently and flexibly. In addition, we had to be able to handle a very significant amount of data. So we use 100Mb per second for both offline and online. Only the left eye was presented in the timeline as a reference, so it had to be able to adapt to the eyes independently using the EDL. By the way, I wouldn't have been able to use the Cineform clips even at a lower resolution. Since I only had a week for each online episode, importing clips one by one and creating stereo pairs, like other systems, would have taken too long. Pablo is an intuitive system for learning massively, compared to its competitors, which is very useful for attendees in large projects, such as Safari Adventure Park. Secondly, we love the Stereo TAB as it allows us to always have an auto balance on hand and pin all the stereo clips in a single tab. Thirdly, the text tab function allows us to overwrite text in a 3D clip, which is a great time saver,” said Wooster.

Regarding the Neo panels, the production director of Can Communicate, maintains that "they have a very polished interface, it is very easy to work with, and it is tremendously intuitive since it can be customized to your liking."

Wooster also highlights Quantel's support since "you don't have time to go into a million Internet forums to search if you have a problem with something. In less time than it takes to get a response online, we had already called the phone, we had someone inside the system remotely, explaining the problem to us and solving it. The nature of today's 3D work means that new codecs, new cameras, new programs are hitting the streets very quickly, so the continued commitment to R&D on Quantel's part is a great help.

Can Communicate is currently working in stereoscopic on a co-production with Touch Productions about the human body and a production for National Geographic. They will also play a key role in the live coverage of Wimbledon.