Igniting Inferno
- Article 6 of 6
- The Post, November 2000
“Upgrades are always a good thing,” says Claire Pollock. “You get new tools to play with that keep you on your toes. They give you more variety, more scope and more flexibility.” Claire and her colleague, Paul Hannaford, are two of Rushes' Inferno operators. They have recently been testing the latest beta version of Inferno, which has now been released as version 4, and is now installed on both of Rushes' Infernos. “It's a major improvement. It's easier, quicker and less hassle,” is Claire's verdict.
“It’s what we’ve always wanted. We can colour with a proper grader, now,” says Hannaford. “I use it pretty much on everything I do.” Almost as good as a telecine? “Almost.” Other advancements in the new system include a 3D tracer (for putting 3D objects into a moving image), Expressions (a way of applying effects to whole groups of objects) and a Motion-Estimated Time Wipe. “Time wiping is a means of vari-speeding a clip,” explains Pollock. “A normal time wipe increases the length of clip by creating extra frames from mixing other frames together, maybe adding a bit of trail for good measure. Motion estimation creates new frames by analysing the motion of an image. It creates arrows which show the motion, and you can adjust them yourself when they’re wrong. You get a much smoother end result.”
The new features are already getting used on jobs for the likes of Mitsubishi and Virgin, but and while Discreet has already sent round people to demonstrate the new features, Pollock prefers to test them before using them on a job. “You’re always aware of what you can do when clients are there. Ideally, it’s good to play with the tools before using them in a job, although sometimes an opportunity arises in a job to try it out.” Hannaford agrees. “A lot of them are better done without clients. Sometimes, when you get into a module, you can get bogged down.” Having tried the features during the beta, Hannaford and Pollock are already familiar with the majority and some of their feedback has seen its way into the final version. “I gave Discreet a few comments. Now, when you’ve set up a mesh, you don’t have to rend out the image to see what the image looks like without it.”
The upgrade to version four of Inferno at Rushes has only been possible because of the recent purchase of SGI Onyx 2 workstations for the Infernos. Another Inferno-equipped outfit (that shall remain nameless) still uses Onyxes – and has been left in the technological backwater of version 2.5, as Hannaford recounts. “We had to pass them a job but they couldn’t read the files, so we had to render the files out separately.” He smiles. “We like to be on the cutting edge.”