The expansion comes in response to an increased demand for HD telecine, explains PostWorks CEO David Rosen. “Due to those increasing demands, the need for HD telecine is now an everyday reality. Propelled even further by the increased volume of work that’s resulting from the Made In NY tax incentives, we are seizing the opportunity to provide a greater level of post production services to support the unprecedented volume of production that’s finding its way to us.”
Over the past year, PostWorks has provided telecine services for numerous major dramatic and documentary feature films, television specials, series and short-form projects, including handling the dailies for numerous New York-based television pilots earlier this year. One of those pilots, Barry Levinson’s and Tom Fontana’s The Bedford Diaries, was picked up by the WB, and PostWorks is currently handling that series’ dailies, HD conforms and color correction.
Also driving the new expansion are dailies assignments for HBO’s The Wire, NBC’s The Book of Daniel, Chad Lowe’s Beautiful Ohio, and Lasse Hallstram’s The Hoax, as well as 2K data scanning for Digital Intermediate finishing on Jonathan Demme’s Prairie Wind feature documentary for Paramount Pictures.
PostWorks’ colorist Ken Rubenfeld says the da Vinci 2K Plus’ Gallery and built-in TLC features will be particularly useful. “With Gallery,” he explains, “we have a library to resource stills and color settings that live beyond the project, which can be shared across all systems and used in any of our rooms. Since so many of our projects are multi-sync – producing 30 frame SD tapes for the offline and 24p HD masters – the TLC has become a critical part of our workflow.”
In addition to the telecines, the studio has added two 32-inch HD/SD Sony monitors, one of which is fed via a new For-A Hanabi HVS-1000HS digital switcher. Keycode and the ability to perform dual HD/SD transfers is made possible via an Evertz system. A Leader 5700 scope was added for quality control purposes.
In related news, PostWorks has acquired The Lab at Moving Images, a motion picture processing facility that launched in 2002. The Lab offers development of 35mm, Super 35mm, 16mm and Super 16mm color negative film, as well as cross-processing and skip bleach processing services. The facility was recently awarded the processing duties for the current season and eight additional episodes of HBO’s The Sopranos.
The enterprise becomes PostWorks, The Lab, effective immediately. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Both Domenic Rom and Chuck Roback will continue on in their leadership roles, and The Lab's entire employee roster will join the PostWorks family. It will continue to operate at its present 4,000 square-foot location on 45th Street, and construction is underway for an additional location that will be within walking distance from PostWorks' 6th Avenue location in SoHo.