Rob Legato on HDCAM-SR

By Michael Goldman

While recently directing two commercials and preparing to direct his first movie, Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Rob Legato relied heavily on the HDCAM-SR format. Legato says he considers HDCAM-SR a portable mastering tool, and he is using it as the foundation of the cost-effective digital filmmaking pipeline he has built in, of all places, the basement of his home in Pasadena, Calif.

The idea, Legato says, was to build an infrastructure that could allow him to personally work on high-end imagery for commercials and feature films without the expense of a costly effects or mastering facility. Legato says his basement setup allows him to pre-visualize, edit, color correct, composite, master, and render high-end imagery by himself, with a small group of employees, or in collaboration with small boutique facilities nearby, depending on the project.

He began formulating the concept late last year while working on effects and directing second unit for Martin Scorsese on The Aviator (see the January 2005, issue of Millimeter). Since then, the basement''s capabilities have grown as Legato personally edited and finished a Ford SUV commercial and a PacificCare commercial that he directed.

Legato says the advent of HDCAM-SR makes it all possible. He says the format allows him to apply feature-film mastering techniques to commercial work, and to work more economically on feature films by “hand-crafting” much of the imagery himself.

“HDCAM-SR is the best mastering medium out there right now in a portable way,” he explains. “In most cases, it becomes my original digital negative. For the PacificCare spot, for instance, we got the source material from CBS (clips from the original "I Love Lucy" show) already mastered to SR tape, and that meant we had no reason to go back to film. Everything is as clean as possible in a portable storage medium. Instead of having everything on a giant server and moving it to another server, I can store it all on tape, access it with an EDL, bring it online instantly, and save the expense of needing a big facility with a big I/O department to dump everything on and off of servers.”

Legato''s postproduction producer and partner Ron Ames says the basement setup permits any film footage scanned to uncompressed 4:4:4 HD resolution in Cineon log density space, or any digitally acquired footage, to come into Legato''s network on 10-bit, 4:4:4 SR tape. From there, it can be cloned for protection, and then down-rezzed for offline editing on Avid, Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premiere Pro systems. Only the SD version gets a preliminary color-grade pass, while the HDCAM-SR version stays raw.

“We use (Adobe) Premiere Pro on an HP 8200 workstation, outfitted with a Blackmagic Design (HD Link) uncompressed 4:4:4 HD capture card and a Huge Systems MediaVault array to digitize the SR tape, and we can then auto-conform at 23.97fps based on the standard-def offline EDL,” Ames explains. “We''ve configured an (LCD HD) viewing monitor that is capable of displaying the files loaded with 2D or 3D LUTs for accurate color display. The whole system is calibrated to linearize the files and display them according to the working color space.”

Eventually, after color correction is performed on the SR images upstream from the viewing LUT, and visual effects and opticals are incorporated into the cut and color corrected, Legato and his team can render and record the imagery back to SR tape as an HD master for video deliverables. Or they can extract sequential .dpx files from the rendered .AVI files and export them to FireWire drives for color tweaks and a final filmout at any facility filmmakers might choose.

(For a detailed look at Legato''s work on the two commercials, the workflow he has designed, and his feature film plans, see the upcoming September issue of Millimeter.)