PRODUCTION & POST NEWS SECOND REEF BECOMES EXCLUSIVE DISTRIBUTOR OF BLACKWING7 LENSES Second Reef GmbH is now the exclusive distributor of the well-received Tribe7 Blackwing7 lenses in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Based in Germany, the company has been working with Tribe7 on the roll-out of the lenses since very early in the project, and the new agreement will help to streamline delivery times and continue service support. The timing coincides with the release of the newest focal length of 20.7mm
Purpose-designed for large format motion picture imaging, Blackwing7 lenses represent an entirely new range of tuned optics for contemporary filmmakers to use within their creative storytelling. Lens tuning allows parameters such as sharpness, contrast, roll-off, spherical aberration, field curvature, edge halation and flare to be modified to provide sets of ‘curated’ optics to suit the personality and intent of the owner. The lens range comprises a core set of seven focal lengths (27, 37, 47, 57, 77, 107 and 137mm) plus the newly added 20.7mm - with three tuning options per focal length, configurable at point of manufacture.
FILMGRAB CINEMATIC VISUAL REFERENCE SERVICE
If you want an example of how an obsession evolves into an industry service, look no further than cinematographer/camera operator Donnacha Coffey and the website he has been building for the last 12 years called FilmGrab (film-grab.com), writes Michael Goldman. FilmGrab is an online still photo library/ database featuring reference imagery from over 2,660 separate motion pictures - ranging from shorts and indie films to the latest studio fare, approximately 170,000 separate images, all of them hand-picked and uploaded by Coffey himself, with more on the way. He says he started the site as a personal blog to share reference imagery, but since then, it has become an important resource for filmmakers, educators, students, art and cinema aficionados, and more. “After I started the site as a hobby, every time I went back to look, the numbers were growing and people were requesting images from various films,” Coffey says. “I started at the time with frame grabs from DVDs, and now it’s Blu-rays or streamed films. I usually will have watched the movie recently, and then I go through it faster, using a shortcut set-up on my computer to skip ahead or back, a frame at a time. It can come down to a single frame to get the right facial expression, an eyeline, anything that might turn an OK shot into a great still shot. Then, I’ll edit my selections to get to a number I like, usually between 60 and 65 still frames from each film. It’s quite labour intensive, but my motto for doing it is that if one person does it right one time, then it is done, and no one will have to do it again. So, I’m putting my time into hopefully save time for other people.” Coffey charges nothing for the stills, refuses to sell anything, and goes out of his way not to profit in any way from the site. That is necessary to avoid copyright or licensing fee issues with intellectual property owners. The site is strictly a
service for educational, journalistic, and reference use, and since he doesn’t profit from the images, there are no rights’ fees entanglements. Instead, he earns his living from his own film work and offering consultancy services to those searching for reference imagery for their own film, teaching or artistic projects. Beyond that, the site asks for donations from those who are so inclined. “These are not my photos, so there would be no point in trying to profit off them,” he says. “It’s a service. A lot of colleges and film courses use them, for example. Everything is searchable by film, director, cinematographer, production designer, costume designer, year, decade, genre, and so on.”
COLORFRONT LAUNCHES STREAMING SERVER FOR REMOTE COLOUR-ACCURATE POST PRODUCTION Colorfront, the developer of high-performance on-set dailies and transcoding systems for motion pictures and high-end TV production, has launched Colorfront Streaming Server, a live-streaming appliance that delivers colour fidelity and real-time performance for remote post production operations. The new product ensures that everyone collaborating remotely on a project post production creatives and multiple clients - can simultaneously see the same material, with identical colour-accuracy, in grading suite or screening room image-quality, wherever they are located around the world. Colorfront Streaming Server can live-stream colour and frame-accurate footage in reference quality 4K HDR from third-party grading, editorial and VFX applications - such as Blackmagic Resolve, FilmLight Baselight, Adobe Premiere, Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut and Autodesk Flame - to multiple remote clients simultaneously anywhere around the world. The appliance works in real-time with HD, 2K, 4K and stereo3D content, in Rec709 SDR or HDR with Dolby Vision, and uses SRT (Secure Reliable Transport Protocol) to deliver low-latency live video, plus multi-channel audio, over the public internet to multiple remote clients concurrently. On the client side, inexpensive small form-factor equipment - AJA T-Tap Pro, Blackmagic Design UltraStudio 4K Mini, and Apple M1 Mac Mini - support Colorfront’s complementary Streaming Player software and enable colouraccurate viewing and QC on a range of professional 4K HDR reference displays, Apple XDR Pro and prosumer OLED screens. 14 MAY 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD
SOFT LIGHT. PRECISE WHITE.
Coffey admits he does this work strictly as a labour of love, because he is obsessed with filmmaking. But he says the educational and referential value of the image database he has built is something central to cinematic communication. “When I talk to cinematographers, or consult with them, we instantly talk in references,” he says. “We might say that is a ‘Kubrick’ thing or whatever. You build a vocabulary, a language of film, so beautiful still images as a reference point are just a better way to communicate such ideas. Seeing it is always better than words on a page.”
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