Amazing Digital Studios is First in France to Install SpeedGrade DI

Debut Project, "Choisir d’aimer," Takes Prize at Festival of Angers

Paris: January 31, 2008 ... Amazing Digital Studios, one of the top French digital postproduction facilities, has selected SpeedGrade DI as the finishing system for their 2K/4K pipeline. This is the first installation of IRIDAS’ high-end grading application in France. Following extensive in-house testing, Amazing Digital Studios threw a real challenge at SpeedGrade for its first project in December 2007. That project was the film "Choisir d’aimer," by director Rachid Hami, which was awarded the Prix du Public at this month’s Festival of Angers.

Shot on 16mm, "Choisir d’aimer" was scanned at 2K and finished entirely in SpeedGrade DI, including conform (with speed changes and freeze frames) and grading in logarithmic color space. The final render was printed to 35mm for public presentation.

"We were thrilled by the stability and the quality of the system," said Frederic Savoir, technical director of Amazing Digital Studios. "The interface is very intuitive: the learning curve was less than a day. 2K playback was flawless and the floating-point color engine is by far the most advanced that I have worked with."

Amazing Digital Studios benefited from SpeedGrade DI's non-destructive grading technology. Color decisions could be edited or refined at any point, allowing for flexibility and creativity despite a tight deadline for the project. "We really like the way SpeedGrade uses the GPU for real-time grading, and then switches to our 8-core CPU for rendering," commented Savoir, who ran SpeedGrade on a Mac Pro under OS X 10.5. "This particular project had to be completed on a very short timeline. Between the scan and the print to film, we only had 4 days to conform, grade and finish this 52 minute piece. Thanks to the stability of this tool, we had no issues or crashes at all.”

The results have been impressing audiences with a rich visual tableau, underscoring strong performances by the actors and a beautiful love story about tolerance and compassion. "Even the committee at the Festival was blown away by the image quality of this film. It doesn't look like 16 mm at all," said Frederic Savoir of the film's premiere. "A gorgeous result on an incredibly short schedule: something like that was not previously possible at this quality or price. We even used SpeedGrade DI's pan-and-scan features to output the HD/SD version on the same system. Our clients are going to love this!"

With SpeedGrade DI, Amazing Digital Studios is now prepared for the whole gamut of new workflows and digital cinema cameras, including RAW and stereoscopic formats.

SpeedGrade DI 2007 is part of the SpeedGrade family of grading applications and runs on Mac and Windows. For more information visit www.speedgrade.com or contact IRIDAS at +49 89 330 35 142 or IRIDAS USA at (818) 951-8927 to arrange for testing at your facility.

About Amazing Digital Studios
Amazing Digital Studios is a full post-production company based in Paris, France, specializing in high-end made-to-measure solutions for film, broadcast, and commercials and new media. For more information contact: info@amazingdigitalstudios.com

About IRIDAS
IRIDAS pioneered desktop film-resolution playback in 2001. Its FrameCycler products are now the industry standard for frame-based image review. In 2003 IRIDAS introduced the first non-destructive color correction application. Today SpeedGrade and FrameCycler provide the critical links in an end-to-end pipeline for uncompressed content and color metadata. IRIDAS' applications are used by filmmakers around the world and most major animation and postproduction houses. IRIDAS is an independent, privately held company headquartered in Munich, Germany. For more information, visit www.iridas.com.