50 Kaliber Films Love “The B Word”
(B = Blackmagic Design)
By Evan Butson, Senior Editor, 50 Kaliber Films
About the Author
For over 15 years, I have worked in the post production industry, having started as an assistant editor for several post houses in Melbourne working on TV commercials. I have been a contributing editor to Digital Media World Magazine and a speaker at many industry forums and events on Digital Post Production. In addition to my role as Senior Editor at 50 Kaliber Films, I am an Adobe Ambassador for the Asia Pacific region, specializing in video production and effects. I am also an Industry Liaison Advisor for VET (vocational educational training) students in Melbourne and Queensland.
About 50 Kaliber Films
50 Kaliber Films are a video production company committed to producing high quality brand commercials, television programming, corporate communications and web videos. Based in Melbourne, we have been producing videos for multi-national and local businesses since 2002, and we pride ourselves on providing outstanding video production services, every time, always on time and on budget.
In the seven years since Dieter Kahsnitz and Lindsey Hughson founded 50 Kaliber Films, we have grown rapidly from an ‘officeless production company’ to a fully fledged production house. We now employ 15 people, as well as a number of freelancers who are hired for specific jobs.
Who We Work With
We are a boutique production house with agency connections and experience, so within the corporate scope of our work, our work is up against some of the world’s best.
Our clients include some of the world’s largest corporations such as BHP Billiton, Mercedes-Benz, Ford Australia, Honda MPE, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Telstra Super and Fonterra Brands. We also work with smaller companies, too, all the time trying to provide the best possible products and services to our clients.
50 Kaliber’s Unique Style
Our films have two signature styles - sleek, seamless, emotive and high quality for our corporate clients – and a Factual Entertainment/”Laughumentary” style.
No holding back on our creative, baby!
We recently completed, and are quite proud of, the creation of new opening credits for our web show - The C Word… Cars, Characters, Confessions, Cultures, Cycles and more.
You can view all of the current episodes of our show (created with Blackmagic) here: http://www.cword.tv
The C Word is our web show for those interested in cars and culture, and having a laugh whilst learning a little – with crazy cuts, out there grading and a dance along the line of funny and… - did he just say that?
Our Technology Portfolio
On the technology side, we use Apple Xserve, Final Cut Pro Server, Mac Pro and iMac computers, Final Cut Studio, Adobe Creative Suite 4 – Master Collection, Magic Bullet, Panasonic HVX202 as our primary camera, as well as Sony HVR-Z1P 1080i camcorder. And, of course, Blackmagic Design.
Our Blackmagic Design Workhorses
We use two Blackmagic Design Multibridge Pro editing systems as our primary ingest sources as well as five Intensity cards for local monitoring. We have used a variety of hardware cards and when the time came to upgrade our suites with new hardware, Blackmagic Design products were chosen for ease of integration with our existing workflow and software tools. The affordable cost, quality of input/output, and wide range of products were also contributing factors in our decision to go with Blackmagic Design.
We have used Blackmagic Design Intensity cards for simple monitoring as well as higher end Blackmagic Multibridge Pro where multiple I/Os are required. The physical form factor of the Multibridge Pro was also a plus, being a totally external device and rack mountable meant we did not have to deal with interference inside the computer case. And we didn’t have to deal with external cable dongles that, in our experience, are the primary point of failure in I/O cards. Since it is rack mountable, integrating the Multibridge Pro with our existing patch bays was very easy.
Blackmagic Design was a good choice for us because we needed solutions that were software agnostic — they had to work equally well with Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Encore. Blackmagic’s solutions enable us to share media with different products and in both OS X and Windows environments. Blackmagic products have excellent driver support for current software and this gives us unlimited flexibility on how we may deploy the hardware in the future.
We wanted something that would be seamless and because we use Blackmagic products for output ref, we needed something that was fast and unseen, and that’s what they are.
Flexibility and Usability
Over my career, I have used just about every major video I/O gear available, from my first use of NLE with Avid Media Composer v3.0 to D Vision, Lightworks and Matrox DigiSuite.
I personally transitioned my suites to Blackmagic products in 2007, primarily because they are easy to deploy, and all the products retain compatibility with each other even over many years. Older hardware is supported with driver updates, so the individual hardware has a very long life, not restricted by old drivers.
When we made the decision to perform a massive hardware upgrade to the edit suites at 50 Kaliber, Blackmagic Design was the obvious choice.
The deployment of Blackmagic equipment was very simple and straightforward. A massive plus was that the deployment did not impact the editors at all – they did not need to learn new software or change the existing workflow. Blackmagic Design hardware is very passive in that it just sits there and works in the background. Cost was a factor to a certain extent, and Blackmagic hardware is very cost effective. This was by no means the primary concern -- at the end of the day, stable and extensible hardware was more important than cost cutting.
Workflow Compatibility
Our workflow has developed over time. We recently transitioned our primary edit suites over to a Fibre Channel SAN and our workflows are being continuously updated.
Our media is now ingested through a capture workstation running a Multibridge Pro from a variety of sources – primarily HDV, DVCAM and DigiBeta. We are also transitioning to using more and more tapeless media by way of the Panasonic P2 format.
Once the media is ingested, it is entered into the Final Cut Pro Server database, and then any editor on the SAN can access that material for editing. They all monitor to CRT screens via Intensity cards. All editing is done over the SAN and final jobs are either sent to the render queue for digital delivery or, for rush jobs, they can be pulled up on the capture workstation and played out in real-time to tape by the Multibridge Pro.
Competitive Advantages
In our industry, there’s a need to produce all different types of video products. That means television commercials, wallpaper videos for shows and events, internal videos, external brand videos and creative, and high quality video clips for the web.
The price and performance of Blackmagic Design products help us deliver the highest value and best production quality to our clients within the budgets that they have established.
Since our workflow changes from job to job, we need to be fast to adapt to new situations and Blackmagic Design allow us to do that.
In previous jobs, we have used other post production tools. They’re not bad, but they don’t stand up to Final Cut Pro and Blackmagic Design. Blackmagic products give us a competitive edge because when you have the right tools you’ll always be one step ahead, making things fast and easy. Blackmagic Design allows us to do our job well and knock our clients’ socks off and stay ahead of the pack.
No matter the input required, from composite VHS all the way up to 2K RED files, Blackmagic Design has the hardware to ingest, monitor and output. It’s comforting to know that we can rapidly re-deploy the hardware if our needs change, we are not locked into a specific editing package or operating system. If we decide to make a change, we know the hardware is available and ready.
Catering to our clients’ needs is paramount to us and with Blackmagic Design, we can always give them our best!
