The UK's most famous animation studio, Aardman, has invested in an Autodesk Smoke editing and finishing system.
The system has already been put to use on the first two episodes of Timmy, a 52 x 10-minute pre-school show for CBeebies. It will also be used on the second series of Shaun The Sheep which is currently in pre-production.
"We used to use general PC/Mac-based products, but they're too slow for an HD series production, and in a business where labour makes up most of our costs, time is money," explained Ian Fleming, head of production technology at Aardman. "We looked at competitive products but we found Smoke to be more flexible and a better fit for our workflow. We like that it's software rather than hardware-based - and it actually turned out to be more cost-effective than the other products we looked at."
Aardman rented a Smoke system from Autodesk systems reseller XTFX earlier in the year to try it out on Animals Save The Planet, a series of environmental shorts for Animal Planet."We had a very positive experience with Smoke on the Animal Planet project," said Fleming."We shoot all our footage on HD Cameras at 1920x1080 so it's very high quality. We needed a system that would maintain the integrity of the image throughout production. As Smoke is resolution independent, we don't need to do any transcoding and we can stay in RGB."
The Smoke system was sold and installed by XTFX, along with a Sledgehammer HD!O from Maximum Throughput. Aardman uploads shots to the Sledgehammer which are then offlined using Final Cut Pro. XML files are then sent to the Smoke system for online editing, grading and finishing.
"XTFX came up with a good workflow for us and it all plugged together very easily," explained Fleming. "We have two separate pipelines for Timmy and Shaun but both projects go through the Sledgehammer and are finished in Smoke. We were one of the first few companies in the world to create a workflow based on using stills cameras for HDTV. We've changed a lot of our technology and it's been a steep learning curve, but we now have a pipeline for digital stills animation which can also be scaled up for feature films."
Aardman originally invested in Smoke to speed up editorial, but now uses it for grading, conforming and finishing as well. While Aardman has always done most of its post-production in-house, it used to outsource finishing work to facilities. According to Fleming, "With Smoke, we retain control of the production from start to finish and we have the flexibility to allow for changes in deadlines."
As well as Smoke, Aardman also uses Autodesk Maya 3D modelling and animation software and Autodesk Combustion desktop compositing software. |
