Although Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict is being shot in hd, it won’t be posted in that format for now, due to both cost and schedule restraints. The tapes are being sent to post house Command Post/toybox and downconverted to the digital non-hd 601 ntsc format for editing and effects work, which are performed at Tattersall Casablanca and Calibre Digital Pictures, respectively.

As hd engineer/consultant Robert Brunelle explains, hd is in the middle in terms of visual effects rendering time.

‘A good film-finish rendering would be 4,000 x 4,000 [lines of] resolution, hd is basically 2,000 x 1,000, 601 ntsc is 720 x 486. And that’s where [productions] can save time – in rendering scenes alone. Doing compositing on ntsc takes x amount of time, hd is x times five, and film is five times that.’

Alliance Atlantis’ Steve D’Onofrio and the visual effects team are also happy with the changeover in that the matte shots they get from production will now be perfectly steady.

‘In 35mm, the film cameras are mechanical, so you usually get a little bit of film weave [as the film travels through the gate],’ D’Onofrio explains. ‘That was an extra step the effects guys sometimes had to do to stabilize that. In video, obviously you don’t have it.’

The effects people can also locate blue and green screen areas in shots with greater ease in hd since the dop can use a vectroscope on the camera control unit to ascertain whether there is sufficient color separation between foreground and background blue/green screen. *