I’ve been color correcting episodes of Destination Extreme for Wink Inc Productions, which will air on National Geographic in a few weeks. I just heard that the first 4 shows passed QC, which is awesome and takes a bit of the pressure off on the remaining episodes. For this series, I’m using Apple Color almost exclusively; on a Mac Pro with a Blackmagic Intensity Pro and a Dell 2408WFP monitor connected via HDMI. Up to this point, almost all of my color correction work as been done on Macs with Kona 3/2/LH cards with HDLinks and Apple Cinemea Displays. Occasionally I would have a Sony Broadcast CRT available as a quick double-check. But I can say that the cheaper Intensity/Dell solution works every bit as well as the Kona/HDLink/Apple setup. I hooked up a Sony CRT to double-check images, but after a short while I didn’t need it anymore. Broadcast quality monitoring has finally dropped below the $1000 threshold. Very cool.
For those paying attention, you will notice that this is the same Mac Pro that Wink Inc is using as their Video Editing over Ethernet (VEoE) server. For the most reliable installation, I, along with other installers will recommend that the VEoE server basically be used for nothing but servering. But we thought we would see what we could really get away with. I was color correcting Uncompressed 10bit HD files while other systems were editing DVCPRO HD all from the attached CalDigit storage with minimal drop frames. We were pretty impressed. For the remaining episodes we are going to switch over to a ProRes online which should eliminate all the drop frame issues and speed up file transfers. I worked for 1.5 weeks color correcting and never had a crash or system error. The Mac Pro just hummed along with no issues.