NEW YORK - Creative Bubble (www.creativebubble.com), here, is seeing an increased demand for HD services and has upgraded its facilities to be fully HD compliant and capable. The studio recently upgraded its Flame system to Version 8.5, and has replaced its Silicon Graphics Octane workstations with more powerful Tezro systems from SGI.
"There's a combined sense of excitement and relief," says Doug Dimon, senior effects artist at Creative Bubble. "HD work has been ramping up significantly in the last couple of years. There are more and more channels broadcasting in HD, and HD televisions are more affordable than ever. For those and other reasons, the networks are realizing that it makes more sense to do everything in HD and downconvert to standard definition when necessary. For us, that means that instead of one HD project per year, we're doing one every month or so. We needed a solution specifically for graphics, and Flame 8.5 on the Tezro certainly fit the bill. With our new setup, we can also do HD conforms and outputs. It's been great."
Creative Bubble completed an HD open for "Digging for the Truth," a new show on The History Channel that takes a fresh look at ancient mysteries. Creative Bubble's audio department, Burst, has also undergone upgrades to better support 5.1 surround work.
"Our room was originally designed for surround sound, so it wasn't too hard to upgrade," says Burst audio engineer Mike Barrett. "We actually did the upgrade very quickly, mainly so we could work with Hungry Man director Brian Buckley on his short film 'The Wake-Up Caller.' He needed a surround sound mix and we were able to do a pretty quick upgrade to accommodate him. Now, we're running all JenLX speakers together with a JenLX subwoofer and a Blue Sky bass management system. We also have Dolby Surround tools within our Pro Tools system that can actually encode Pro Logic."
Since working on Buckley's film, the Burst team has worked on a 5.1 mix for "Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story," a USA Network documentary about the six-time world champion boxer.