HD Facility Profile: Cerebral Lounge
They don’t serve drinks at Cerebral Lounge. The Silver Spring, Maryland, post-production company creates high-definition commercials and short spots for the likes of Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Sundance Channel, TLC, Travel Channel, PBS, and various advertising agencies. “We cater to the local market,” says creative director Lee Konen. “There’s a huge demand around the Washington, D.C., area for companies that do what we do. This is a great area for documentaries and television programming, but there aren’t a lot of people who do promotional work.”
The lounge mixes its concoctions on Power Mac G5s using Final Cut Pro, Shake, and Adobe After Effects. Partner company Clean Cuts Music adds a splash of sound and music — using Pro Tools on Macs. The completed Cerebral Lounge cocktails can be caught between your favorite programs.
“We would have had to spend almost $180,000 to get any other systems that could do the things our Final Cut systems can do.”
Building a Lounge
Konen cut his teeth at post and design firms in Tampa, Miami, and Washington, D.C. In 2004, he saw an opportunity to branch off on his own to start Cerebral Lounge. “I wanted more creative freedom,” he said. “I also saw that there was a real need for something like it in this area.” Konen partnered with Clean Cuts Music to create Cerebral Lounge. The two companies have a symbiotic relationship; both feed each other work and share some aspects of business organization, including office space.
Cerebral Lounge is a serene spot where clients and editors can collaborate, a stylish Zen workspace that feeds creativity. Konen wanted a similar computing environment for his editing and effects gurus. He chose Power Mac G5s and Final Cut Pro. “It’s an intuitive system,” he says. “The ease of use is really nice.”
Ease of use wasn’t the only reason Konen went with Apple. “We would have had to spend almost $180,000 to get any other systems that could do the things our Final Cut systems can do,” he says. “There really wasn’t a better choice, financially.” In the end, the lounge was outfitted with four Power Mac G5 editing suites, a Maya 3D suite built around another Power Mac G5 with a small render farm of additional Power Macs and almost a dozen terabytes of Xserve RAID storage.
The ability to do quick, high-quality compositing and green screen work was also a deciding factor. “Shake has a really powerful compositing engine,” says Konen. “The rotoscope tools are amazing; they’re better than anything else I’ve seen. You also have access to unlimited rendering processors. If you have 10 G5 systems, you can use all of the processors to render without spending money on additional licenses. That really speeds up our workflow.”
Straight, No Chaser
“I like focusing my energies on a 30-second clip,” says Konen. Through his commercial work, he grew to love punchy witticisms and eye-catching graphics. When he built Cerebral Lounge and moved into film and motion graphics in 2004, the preferences stuck. A mix of cable network promos and advertising agency spots keep the new post-production studio busy.
That includes using Final Cut Pro, Shake, Adobe After Effects, and Maya to create high-def graphics for existing standard-definition programs that are being conformed for high-def broadcast. The seven lounge employees re-create existing graphics or craft new ones for the programs. The process often involves shuffling files between Final Cut Pro, Shake, After Effects, and Maya.
“That’s the best thing about the Mac-Final Cut system,” says Konen. “There are so many tools out there for graphics and editing and it all integrates so well. Everything is native QuickTime, so I don’t have to export anything. If I want to take something that I’ve digitized in Final Cut, I can just put it in After Effects. It’s already a QuickTime file. With other systems, I would have to convert it and that takes time. With the Mac, when you get all these applications open and push video from one to another, you don’t waste time with conversions.”
The editors at the lounge dump native, uncompressed high-definition footage into an Xserve RAID storage system, which anyone in the shop can access.
The lounge crew can work with a variety of video codecs. “We do all of our HD work in Sony HDCAM SR or DVC PRO HD,” says Konen. “We typically deliver our HD content in HDCAM SR, but we can work with any number of HD codecs if we need to. We have an HDCAM SR deck and we have a DVC PRO HD deck. We can do 1080i or 720p. We can do virtually any format of standard definition. We’re not limited at all.”
