Post House Creative is a full-service video production and animation boutique based in Columbus, Ohio. They combine award-winning creative talent and deep marketing expertise to help their clients take their vision from paper to pixels.
On a recent project for the Columbus Blue Jackets, Post House Creative had an opportunity to try something new with their clients. Instead of the usual style frames, storyboarding, and animatics, they went with a hybrid video game/app based on the Unreal Engine called Cine Tracer.
Cine Tracer is a realistic cinematography simulator that allows a user to build, stage, and capture scenes in stunning real-world environments using industry-standard lighting, rigging, and camera setups.
Rapid Ideation
The shoot required building a set on ice in the middle of a hockey rink, and with Cine Tracer, they were able to create and stage the set to scale to show the client exactly how much space it was going to take.
“The client already had an idea of what they wanted. They sent some references, and we were able to take those and build out the set,” said Tony Adkins, a motion designer and editor at Post House Creative.
“Cine Tracer has industry-standard equipment built in. So there wasn’t any guess-work when trying to fine-tune camera settings and lightings. It was super fast to iterate until we landed on something the client liked. You can’t really do that in a hand-drawn storyboard.”
CineTracer lets users build, stage, and capture scenes in real-world environments using industry-standard light, rigging, and camera setups.
Cine Tracer represents a significant shift in the previz space, which previously relied on powerful workstations and traditional VFX software tools. Like virtually everything else in our industry, the tools to create high-end content are more affordable and more accessible than ever before—and similar shifts are happening in post-production.
More data is being generated than ever before, and teams need new tools to manage their files and deliver media and projects to all of their workstations—without relying on individual hard drives to copy files back and forth.
Streamlined Collaboration in Post
The project generated 1.5TB of footage during production. Everything was shot in 4K on a RED Epic Dragon and Scarlet Mysterium using a variety of Canon L and Fujinon lenses, with a DIT backing up RED mags to portable storage that they brought back to the studio and offloaded to their EVO 16 Bay shared storage video server.
The studio houses four primary edit suites, two upgraded Mac Pros, and two Windows workstations. There are four full-time Premiere editors and motion graphics artists, and up to ten people accessing projects and footage at any given time.
With that many users needing access to files for editing and review, it was important for them to have a server that could support 4K editing across all of their machines. “We have multiple projects going on simultaneously 100% of the time,” Tony Adkins explained.
Before centralizing their storage and media management, they were always duplicating files. Projects would often span multiple hard drives, making it impossible to keep track of all of their project versions and linked media.
Now, EVO gives everyone on the team the ability to access media and projects in real-time, and all of their files can be tagged, previewed, and organized using ShareBrowser, EVO’s built-in media asset management software.
“Collaboration is the biggest benefit.” Tony continued, “It’s so nice to be able to jump in and out of projects without having to hunt down hard drives and files.”
Finishing Projects Faster
Technology is rapidly transforming the way we create media. Previz, the cloud, and high-speed shared storage are giving studios more ways than ever to increase efficiency in their workflows. But for Post House Creative, choosing the right tools is about more than just efficiency.
It’s a competitive advantage that helps them bring their clients’ visions to life faster than ever before.
Want to learn how your team can use EVO to collaborate more effectively and start finishing projects faster? Get an online demo to see how EVO and ShareBrowser could fit into your workflow.