HD Facility Profile: Luna Studio
To be successful, Orlando Luna needs to be flexible. Luna Studio, his Florida-based production company, creates high and standard definition movies, commercials and corporate videos in the United States and Latin America. He has worked with such companies as Nike, the New York Times, Newsweek, Codi International and Univision. Wherever he goes, Luna has to blend in with the production environment, working with everything from raw DVCPRO-HD to standard definition NTSC. To get the job done, he uses Final Cut Pro, a Power Mac G5 and two 17-inch PowerBook G4s.
He shoots nearly all of his projects in HDV, distilling the high-resolution source to standard-definition feeds when needed. The format delivers impressive quality and gives Luna the flexibility he needs to tackle any assignment.
“It starts with quality,” he says. “Coming from a photography background, image quality is really important to me and just seeing the detail level and the quality of HD is amazing. As soon as I saw that, I made a conscious decision to go high definition and I didn’t want to turn back. Even if I had to deliver standard definition, I wanted my original to be in high definition. Having that HD feed lets me deliver in high definition, standard definition NTSC or even PAL.”
HDV and Final Cut Pro
Luna has worked with almost every high-definition format out there, including Panasonic’s DVCPRO-HD and Sony’s HDCAM. He captures footage in remote locations in Latin America, so when had to pick an HD camera for his mobile video suite, he chose the inexpensive Sony HVR-Z1 HDV cam because it’s lightweight and records an MPEG-2 video stream onto compact Mini DV tapes.
The compressed HDV stream makes editing in the field a walk in the park. “We’re able to capture native HDV in the field, edit it and then output it to a DVD or put it back to tape,” says Luna. “We can do all that in a portable situation.”
When he had to choose a suite to cut and massage HD footage, Luna reached for Final Cut Pro, which can handle virtually any HD or SD format and easily transform one feed to another. As a small independent studio, Luna would need that flexibility to please a broad range of clients.
“If the client wants me to shoot Panasonic VariCam, the Final Cut system is ready for it,” he says. “If they want to shoot with Sony’s HDCAM, I can capture uncompressed high definition footage. The flexibility is there to shoot, ingest and output just about every format you can imagine and you don’t have to switch between products to do it. Being able to do it all on one system means I’m going to save my company a lot of money.”
Luna uses Motion and Shake to add effects. He can easily incorporate text or graphics into his projects without juggling multiple file formats. “The interactivity between Final Cut Pro, Motion and Shake is also a huge time saver,” he says. “When you’re doing effects, so much time is spent exporting, importing and making sure the formats are correct. Now I can use Final Cut almost as my hub, using Motion and Shake as extensions of the product without having to be ultra-critical in designing workflows for exporting and importing.”
Editing on the Road
When he’s on the road, Luna edits and polishes his HDV footage on a pair of 17-inch PowerBook G4s. He captures his footage on Mini DV tape and a Focus Enhancements FireStore FS-4 hard drive recorder. Luna can cram about an hour of footage onto a Mini DV tape and up to six hours on the FireStore. Once he has his footage, he dumps it onto a set of 800-GB G-Technology G-RAID drives. He networks the drives to his PowerBook G4s and edits with Final Cut Pro.
Ideally, Luna does a rough edit on the road and returns to his Power Mac G5-equipped studio in Florida for finishing work — color correction and effects. But when going home isn’t an option, he does nearly all the production work in the field. His laptops are equipped with the same software as his Power Mac G5 and can process HD footage on the fly. “At the end of the project, whether we’re on location or back in the studio, the results are identical,” says Luna.
He can burn a standard-definition DVD master using DVD Studio Pro 4 or deliver a high-definition master on a 100GB G-Technology G-Mini hard drive. For finishing touches, he uses the built-in color correction tools in Final Cut Pro.
“Even though we do let the client know that the footage needs to go through some final color check, we’ll use built-in color-correction tools in Final Cut,” he says. “Since it has scopes, we can look at our wave-form monitor and make sure our luminance values are correct and base our colors on the vector scope. That’s really critical when you’re working in the field because a lot of times your color perception can be thrown off by the environment. In the editing suite, we can control everything; we can have the right colored walls, the right kind of lighting. Out on the road, you don’t have those types of environments.”
In the Studio
In his studio, Luna has a dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 at his disposal. There he can manipulate any HD format, renting additional equipment as needed. In the past, he has shot with Panasonic VariCams and Sony HD cams.
Final Cut Pro lets Luna squeeze any video format to meet his clients’ needs. When he needs to transform an HD master to an SD stream, he uses Compressor, an invaluable Final Cut Pro tool that can convert formats without compromising quality.
“I do all my down conversions with Compressor,” says Luna. “It can handle anything. I’ve had to take video back to film, taking something that was shot in 50i and getting it down to 24p. Compressor did it and I was really pleased with the quality of the final product. It handled that mashing of the interlaced frames back down to a lower-frame progressive very well. Some of my colleagues have taken NTSC to PAL with this tool. We’re basically doing things with this software that couldn’t be done a couple of years ago.”
When all the conversion and processing are complete, Luna stores the final product on a combination of videotape and G-Mini hard drives. One drive is delivered to the client and another is kept on a shelf at Luna Studio. In the future, Luna hopes to use Xserve RAIDs and Xsan to store and edit his footage.
“Three years ago when we got started with high-definition I would approach a project from a limitation standard,” he says. “I would do straight cuts and documentary-style editing. I would stay away from the visual effects because it was very early in the high-definition world. Now I’m looking forward to basically ignoring high definition and just doing everything the way that I’ve always done it.”
