Keeping the flock process on course.(USER FOCUS: DI WORKFLOW)("The Flock" movie)(Final Cut Pro, AJA Video's KONA 3)

In the recently released action/drama The Flock, a vigilant state agent (Richard Gere)--while training his young female replacement--must track down a missing girl who the agent believes is connected to a paroled sex offender he is investigating. Working against the clock, the pair sort out the details while tracking the potential killer. Similarly, those working on the movie had to work against the clock while solving difficult issues. To this end, the group facilitated its unique 2k workflow and digital intermediate process by using AJA Video's KONA 3 video capture card.

KONA 3 is AJA's uncompressed capture card for SD, HD, Dual Link HD, and 2k for PCI Express (PCIe) Apple G5 Power Macs and Mac Pro systems. Supporting any uncompressed SD or HD format, KONA 3 also captures and plays back uncompressed 10-bit and 8-bit digital video and 24-bit digital audio. With this flexibility, the card was an integral part of the film's Apple Final Cut Pro editing pipeline. Warner Bros. performed the scanning, color correction, and film-out for the project.

David Blum of Phoenix-based Catalyst FX served as the visual effects supervisor on the film, and he recruited George Rizkallah of the Burbank, California, Product Factory to develop a customized 2k pipeline that would enable the team to do a final conform on the feature using Apple's Final Cut Pro. The pipeline employed four KONA 3 cards running on Apple Mac Pro systems with Final Cut Pro on an XSAN network with 26TB of storage. The systems were connected via 2gb Fibre Channel.

"Because of the way that our visual effects shots were created--many multi-layer timeline effects on more than 800 shots--the only practical way to complete the film on time and on budget was to do our final conform in Final Cut Pro," says Blum. "The AJA KONA 3 provided the perfect solution and performed brilliantly, I could not have finished this film without the KONA 3 card. The folks at AJA worked closely with us to ...