Sublime Films Creates High Definition Jumbo Display for Guggenheim Exhibit

New York, NY ­--- The opening of one of the most anticipatedart exhibits in recent history: Matthew Barney's CremasterCycle. The centerpiece of the installation is a five-channel highdefinition sculpture suspended in the middle of the museum that wasengineered by Sublime Films.

The installation fills the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's entirerotunda and two of its annex galleries with sculptures, drawings,photographs, and video. Christopher Seguine of Sublime Films is thetechnical supervisor for the show that opened at the Museum Ludwig,Cologne last summer and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville deParis in the fall.

"The Order" is a pentagon shaped sculpture that houses five gianthigh definition video projections, each of which depicts a differentlevel of the Guggenheim. Barney's character travels from screen toscreen confronting adversaries and solving puzzles in a video game likefashion.

"The jumbo was a very difficult undertaking," admits Seguine. "Thesource was shot 1080 24P and edited uncompressed on our Cinewave system­we needed to maintain that pristine quality since the projectionswould be so large. We also needed frame accurate synchronization of themultiple streams, this had not been done before with 24P material.

"We built custom servers that output streams which matched the exactpanel resolution of the projectors we were using," Seguine adds. "Otherservers will only output standard ATSC HD resolutions which causesscaling artifacts. The streams were very high bit-rate 4:2:2 24PMPEG-2, which provided much better quality and color fidelity thananything commercially available. Audio quality was also important, onelevel has tap dancers, another dueling hardcore bands ­ so eachchannel has its own uncompressed soundtrack. For synchronization wedesigned our own control network that linked the servers viafirewire."

Sublime also provided all the mpeg-2 encoding for the exhibit."Sanyo engine-based LCD projectors provided the brightness and qualitythat fit our budget," says Seguine. "We used anamophic lenses tomaximize their resolution and calibrated them with a spectroradiometerto optimize their contrast ratio. We developed our own proprietaryencoding pipeline that allowed us to go from uncompressed highdefinition quicktimes to the anamorphic MPEG-2 files for theserver."

In addition, Sublime built high definition servers that are playingback the Cremaster films throughout the exhibit. ChristopherSeguine was also the editor and post-production supervisor onCremaster 3, the final installment of the Cremasterfilms, which was an Official Selection at this year's Sundance filmfestival. The Cremaster films will be screening in 35mm at theGuggenheim's cinema and at theaters around the country this spring.

Sublime Films is located in San Francisco's Mission district, and isone of the first post-production facilities anywhere focusing primarilyon the use of HD. Founded in 1999 by Christopher Seguine, former SeniorVideo Engineer at Interval Research Corp. (Paul Allen¹s nowdefunct think tank), Sublime was created specifically to explore thelatest uses for, and future potential of High-Definition technology.Sublime provides complete uncompressed non-linear HD editing and alsooffers compression and engineering services. Sublime caters largely toindependent filmmakers and artists.