Post-production and its powers are personified in this column. We’ll cover new techniques, technologies and the creative personnel and companies giving them vibrant visual life.

Toronto’s Optix Digital Post and FX has been catching the eye of commercial and long-form producers alike with its new Sony 24P HD camera and Jaleo HD system. The timely sprint into high-definition is something Optix had flirted with for some time.

"It’s a cool machine," says owner George Levai of the new Jaleo. "Right now there are only three HD finishing solutions in town, two of them being tape-based, linear-based. Our solution is nonlinear based. It runs on the Onyx, with multiple processors, and has almost terabyte (of storage space) because the data is huge with HD."

As for the 24P, Levai says he has been surprised by how many commercial production houses have shown legitimate interest in the technology in the short time the camera has been with Optix.

"To be honest, we’d always thought the commercial people would be the last to shoot on HD," admits Levai. "It is a very interesting format for long form because there are a lot of savings involved, because you’re not getting into film stocks, and no transferring. With a 30-second commercial it’s not really an issue, but we’ve still done a whole bunch of spots with it."

He says the advantages for commercial makers are similar to those dealing in long form using the 24P. Aside from HD’s well-documented overall cost effectiveness, shooting HD can speed up the shooting day as well.

"What you see is what you get," Levai says. "You don’t have to wait for your rushes to look at your material, and you don’t need a video assist to hook up to the camera to get a black-and-white representation of what you’re shooting. You can literally hook up a monitor and what you see is what you get and you can do color fading and all sorts of stuff."

Levai says it is interesting to watch regular video and film diehards, such as Procter & Gamble, for whom Optix recently did a shoot, slowly making the switch to HD.

"High-def is a video format but it gives you the film result because the native frame rate of film is 24P," says Levai. "It’s the same frames as if you were shooting film. You are shooting on a video format but ending up with a film result."

He says that since Optix acquired the new camera and HD technology there have been a lot of tours and demos performed at the shop.

"Especially for producers," he says. "They are still kind of hesitant of it, but now more and more companies are seeing the advantages of switching to HD. You don’t have to be surprised when in a couple of years we see less and less film."

-www.optix-i.com

Toon Boom is koo-koo

for Cocoa Puffs

MONTREAL’s Toon Boom Technologies is getting buzz in the States, thanks to Class-Key Chew-Po Commercials’ use of TBT’s USAnimation software on a recent set of animated General Mills Cocoa Puffs ads.

The timely spots, known as "Election: Part One" and "Election: Part Two," were directed by Class-Key Chew-Po’s Bonita Versh for Saatchi & Saatchi, New York. In a statement, Versh praised the animatics and compositing features housed within USAnimation. Some of the scenes in the ads had as many as 65 layers.

The final product seen on the spots is a combination of 3D compositing in Lightwave with USAnimation’s 2D capabilities. *

-www.toonboom.com