What does getting ICE’d mean? Think of an all-star ball player who can hit it out of the park on command but doesn’t exactly lead the league in stolen bases. Now add speedballs and watch as he corks one that breaks windows in office buildings across the street and rounds the bases in a blur of pinstripes and polyester before the bat hits the dirt.

Faster and better – according to some of the users of ICE, this is the end result of using ICEfx with their existing gear.

ICEfx is a software package powered by a multiprocessor board, designed to work with Mac and NT workstations, that accelerates the effects power and speed available on the desktop. The current Green ICE board, released earlier this year, uses 16 Sharc processors in a single slot and takes on the computationally dense aspects of effects work.

In addition to accelerated rendering, ICEfx also provides an array of effects. The system works with widely used software products including Adobe After Effects, Puffin Designs’ Commotion, DigiEffects’ Cinelook and Ultimatte to streamline the effects process.

ICE recently introduced ICEfx for Avid, which works directly with Avid Media Composer or Avid Xpress. ICEfx provides Avid users an array of filters and what the company says is up to 20 times the rendering speed within the Avid Effects Palette.

The new Blue ICE board began shipping earlier this month and provides three times the speed of current ICE products. It is also being touted as the first desktop system with the ability to support film and HDTV resolution rendering.

ICE products based on the Blue ICE board will initially be priced the same as current ICE systems, with ICEfx for After Effects at US$4,995 and ICEfx for Avid at US$6,995 for bundled hardware and software systems.

Herewith a discussion with a pair of ICE users, Toronto-based Cuppa Coffee Animation, which used ICEfx with After Effects on an onion of a job for an Italian broadcaster, and Toronto’s Scene by Scene, which uses ICE within its new Avid system and with After Effects.

The best software or the best features within packages can’t be employed on a daily, practical basis if they are prohibitively slow to render. ‘ICE makes products we love more usable, faster and allows changes to be made quickly so your aren’t waiting for rendering,’ says Scene by Scene managing director Bill Kinnon. ‘It still renders, but at 10, 20, or sometimes 30 times faster, it becomes a very useful product.’

Thirteen-year-old post shop Scene by Scene acquired its first ICE board about four months ago, originally to boost the performance of its Cinelook software, a product from DigiEffects that lends video the look of stock-specific film, allowing users to color correct and add grain and film artifacts.

With Cinelook, the look was great, the problem was speed, says Kinnon. But soon after the product was released it was ICE’d, making it a newly viable tool for the shop, which handles design and on-air promos, series work, commercials and music videos. ‘It literally cut the time down to 10% of what it had been,’ says Kinnon.

Kinnon points to an illustrative, if painful, example of the ICE speed factor with a case of some test footage that was treated with Cinelook but was then mistakenly done away with. The process had to be repeated, but this time with ICE’d Cinelook; the rendering took four hours instead of the weekend it had taken without ICE.

That speed has translated to the Avid and then some, says Kinnon. The shop added a Media Composer several weeks ago, expanding its current lineup which includes two Media 100 rooms, a serial digital SGI room with Jaleo and Liberty, as well as a digital Betacam suite and audio post facility.

‘I was expecting ICE not to work as well with Avid because it’s a new product for them,’ says Kinnon. ‘But it actually works better than it does in After Effects. It integrates better, it’s faster and the rendering times are very reasonable.’

Scene by Scene used the configuration on a recent job which entailed a multicamera shoot in the light-challenged environment of a rehearsal studio where filters were not a feasible option. The solution was to use ICE effects like ICE’d Blur in post to lend the feel of a Promist filter, but with more control than that production method allows.

‘They were able to take the highlights, the whites, and blur them and not distort the rest of the picture,’ says Kinnon. The 20-minute doc used eight minutes of this effect, and Kinnon says the result didn’t have an ‘effected’ look. ‘It gave it that kind of film-filtered look without having to do it on set, and it rendered fast enough that it didn’t cost a lot of time in post.’

The project was able to render at less than a second per frame. With the new Blue ICE boards, which recently arrived at the shop, that time will likely be improved to about three frames per second, says Kinnon.

The shop also used ICE for a KTV ID for Global. The background features moving clouds, accomplished within the project’s time frames with ICE’d Fogbank.

Cuppa Coffee joins the Cult

Cuppa Coffee director Justin Stephenson says using ICEfx allowed a whole new approach to creating a myriad-layered, full on-air design package for Cult Network Italia (no, it’s not all zombies all the time; ‘cult’ means fresh, young and hip in that country’s vernacular).

The job, which came from T Pot Design in New York, required a visual manifestation of the catholic nature of the channel, which encompasses a wide array of arts and lifestyle programming.

Delivering a multitude of images and textures involved a live-action digital Betacam shoot in Italy and blue-screen shooting of performers here at Wallace Studios. The job also called for stop-motion animation incorporating various texture cycles and objects, with all elements created to hang together visually and narratively, and pulled together in After Effects.

‘I created layer upon layer of imagery, for example, a Rome street scene with objects like a sunflower and a Bolex camera superimposed on that, then text-generated in After Effects, and on top of that, maybe a trumpet player,’ says Stephenson. ‘All the footage was given texture treatment that made them appear visually rich.’

With the screen divided into several different areas, the design project at times brought into play well over 100 layers of imagery. Creating the look required the temporal and creative leeway provided by ICE working within After Effects, like the filters for the effects in After Effects.

‘I would often stay away from doing a lot of filtering before because the rendering times were horrendous,’ says Stephenson. ‘What ICE allowed me to do was to go hog wild in any direction I wanted to without worrying about waiting 10 days for things to render. It opened up a different area of possibility for compositing, etc.’

Cuppa Coffee also recently completed another project for TSN which made extensive use of Adobe filters for blur.

‘What ICE has done is broken up the blur in a way that you can adjust it horizontally, vertically or on any of the red, blue, green or alpha channels; it makes the effect a lot more flexible,’ says Stephenson.

Film Effects, another favorite package, is also more usable now in its ICE’d form, he adds. ‘It’s now possible to do the math-intensive things that we would usually have to go to an Inferno to do.’