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Milagro Post is based in Southfield, Michigan, just outside Detroit. The company's primary business is creating high-level national and regional television spots for the Big Three car manufacturers: GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler. In Part 1 of this three-part interview, Digital Media Net's Charlie White talked with Michael SuggsSuggs, President of Milagro Post about the beginnings of the company, its equipment and the people who bring it to life.
DMN: Tell me about your role at Milagro Post.
S
uggs: I'm the president of the company, I'm one of the founding partners. My partner Chad Cooper and I got this bright idea to open a post house but we didn't have the capital necessary to open one. At the time, I was working at another post house where Ron Rose Productions had a satellite room. So Chad and I approached Ron Rose and asked if they had ever considered partnering with anyone on video post. They answered with an emphatic yes. Ron Rose Productions is a premier audio post facility that's been around for 30 years, in fact, they just celebrated their thirtieth anniversary. They've done music production, they've done audio postproduction, they've done tons of award-winning work. They're a highly respected company. Today Milagro Post and Ron Rose share space together.
DMN: Where are you located, Michael?
Suggs: We're in Southfield, Michigan [a suburb of Detroit]. We opened our doors 3 1/2 years ago with the idea that we were going to be just a small shop -- an effects and compositing room, an editorial room and some Avid off-line work to go along with it. We thought we would be doing just fine as a little small company like that. Over the past 3 1/2 years we've had three major expansions. Now we have a staff of about 30 people.
DMN: It's really grown a lot. To what do you attribute that growth?
Suggs: The most important part is the people. Everyone who is here -- certainly all of our editors and artists -- are well-respected individuals in the community. They're very talented people; very professional people. We've created an environment where we're about as un-corporate as we can possibly be. Everyone is treated with mutual respect. Everyone has authority with the responsibility as well. Everyone has great reels, and has done really great work. We have a good time. It's a fun place to be, and people like to come and work with us.
DMN: Do you attract people to work there from gigantic markets like New York and LA? How do you do that? How do you attract people to Michigan?
Suggs: That's what we're working on right now -- we're working on breaking out of the market as well, trying to spread our wings a little bit here. Fortunately these days, that distance gap is greatly shortened with the technology. Plus, recently we've installed some services that hopefully will help attract that business. Specifically, we've put in a Thomson Spirit 2K Datacine. We have a Quantel Pablo on iQ, and what we do is scan in film as large data files, not unlike what they do in Hollywood. We actually have a digital intermediate workflow that works very much like what they work with in Hollywood for feature films. What we've done is taken that concept and adapted it to commercial work. We're a commercial post facility.
DMN: I've heard this is the first Spirit 2K system in the United States that's been installed outside of New York and Los Angeles.
Suggs: That is true. We're certainly the first ones to be doing commercial work specifically with it. It's been an interesting journey since we put this in. There were a few misconceptions. We had the Spirit up and running in early April, and, for us, it's a tremendous opportunity for us to be certainly a lot more flexible in the way we post jobs through our facility, especially now, since we truly are tapeless. We have a couple of different networks and we're set up for moving images across the wire. We have a lot of platforms that can take that data and manipulate it, and do compositing work with it, and do cleanup, restoration, what have you, and then send it back into our Pablo room for final color correction. And, we never have to go to tape until we're done with the project.
DMN: So you're completely tapeless. People bring film in and that's scanned with the Datacine 2K, right?
Suggs: That's correct. We scan at 2K resolution -- film resolution -- and then our typical workflow is, we have three Avid Adrenalines, with three off-line editors. They'll work on a project, and then they'll create an edit decision list for us.
DMN: They'll work on the footage using smaller proxies, right?
Suggs: Absolutely. What they do is, they usually work from film dailies. These are DigiBeta, or digital dailies. They'll create an edit decision list once there is an approved cut, and we'll take that edit decision list into the Spirit. The spirit has a data management computer attached to it with an application called Bones that works on it, running on the Linux platform. We'll convert that edit decision list into a film list, and we put the film up and essentially tell it to go fetch all the scenes. Then the Spirit will scan all those scenes into a 32TB storage array. After all the film has been scanned, we take that same edit decision list that Bones has translated into a film list into our Quantel iQ. The iQ can see it as a film list as well. And then we will conform that same list across 4Gb network that's attached to that storage. We're getting real-time speeds across our network, which is great.
DMN: That's some tremendous throughput.
Suggs: We're able to look at 2K data files in real time or better. That's a background task, too, for the iQ.
DMN: What kinds of files are those? Are those DPX files or Cineon?
Suggs: Yes, they are DPX files. We can work in DPX or Cineon or Targa, but the native scan that the Thomson does is a DPX file.
DMN: For those who don't understand this process, these are individual frames, where each one is comprised of a huge amount of data. Can you give us an idea of the pixel size and data used for each frame?
Suggs: In terms of pixels, they're 2048x1556. A single frame of film at that resolution is about 12.5MB. So for every frame of film on that roll, there is an unique file created that is identified with timecode and/or key code, and color space information.
DMN: So you're doing your final processing in real time, viewing these huge files in real time over this network. That's amazing.
Suggs: Yes, it conforms in real time over the network. And then, in Pablo, we have all the heads and tails of each scene, which is nice. One thing about working this way -- and we try to explain it a few different ways to our clients in terms they're familiar with -- one being the tape-to-tape process, where you put your film on a telecine, for instance, do color correction, and lay it off to tape. Then you go into another environment, where you do a conform of those scenes from tape, and then you go back into the film room again for color correction. What we're able to do is bypass all that laying-off-to-tape business. In the Pablo itself we can color correct at film resolution in virtually real time in nonlinear fashion. So by conforming the spot in here in the Pablo, everyone -- including the colorist and the creative person -- can see the spot in context, timed properly, with audio. And the color correction process can begin from that point, including heads and tails of each one of the scenes. So, for instance, you can slip and slide a frame, or 10 frames, or 20 frames, or a few seconds depending on what you allowed for at the beginning of the process.
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