Zoic Bridges Remote Facilities and Paves a Path to 4K with AJA KONA 3G

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With locations in Culver City and Vancouver, Zoic Studios is responsible for award-winning effects in film, advertising, games and television.

In addition to a steady stream of feature, games and commercial projects, Zoic is currently handling VFX for television showsFalling Skies, Once Upon a Time and Wonderland, all shot using virtual sets. The company is also venturing into 4K post-production within their commercial division for the the Intel and Toshiba webisode series, “The Power Within.”. For reliable and efficient collaboration across remote facilities, Zoic relies on AJA’s KONA 3G cards to help facilitate live synchronized sessions using Tweak’s RV-SDI playback and review software.

“KONA 3G is the backbone of high quality image communication between Zoic Vancouver and Zoic Culver City,” said Mike Romey, Zoic Studios Head of Pipeline. “Using the RV-SDI integration, we queue up media in the projection rooms at each location for synced up dailies sessions where teams of artists can review and annotate shots in real time with supervisors at full resolution.”

Zoic’s projection rooms are setup to view HD, 2K and 4K dailies, and are frequently tapped to finalize upwards of 400 VFX shots for each episode, and workflow reliability is paramount. During review, files are opened in Tweak Software’s RV image and sequence viewer, using a custom front end to record dailies into Shotgun Software’s web-based production management platform. Since up to 50 artists and supervisors across both locations might be contributing to a project, Zoic’s KONA 3G-powered workflow allows producers to compare and contrast different versions of any given shot to ensure appropriate edits and design choices are implemented during session reviews.

“We can do instant playback projection to easily show things like the last CG render of the most recent lighting pass. There is constant iterating, and being able to present changes in real time with the KONA 3G is incredibly valuable,” noted Romey.

While a majority of Zoic’s deliverables are in HD, the studio’s commercial division is currently working on webisode content in 4K for Intel and Toshiba. Implementing a 4K pipeline proved to be a fairly straightforward task because of Zoic’s existing infrastructure. The studio uses the KONA 3G cards with The Foundry’s HIERO collaborative shot management solution for plate prep, Autodesk^® Flame^® editorial and color grading software for final conform and finishing, along with RV-HDSDI for review. read more...

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