Nice Shoes Finishes Super Bowl XL Spots In HD With Grass Valley Systems

As it has for the past five years, New York-based commercial post house Nice Shoes will post a number of the commercials seen during this year’s Super Bowl XL standard- and high-definition (SD/HD) simulcast on ABC. And, like in years past, the high-end facility will use Grass Valley image processing equipment and systems from Thomson to generate the high-profile spots watched with anticipation by millions throughout the world.

To gear up for the big event on February 5th, live from Ford Field in Detroit, Mich., Nice Shoes bought and took delivery of three new Grass Valley Spirit 2K DataCine systems and a third Specter 2K Virtual DataCine in the past few months. The facility also owns a Grass Valley Viper FilmStream digital cinematography camera and two Grass Valley Bones Linux-based image restoration and post software packages.

Nice Shoes predicts that at least half of the Super Bowl spots this year will air in native, widescreen 720p HD, the ABC network’s high-definition format of choice. Typically, spots are shot on film, upconverted from SD then aired in HD. At Nice Shoes, the majority of the material received is on film, which is then scanned into a server at 2K res. After that process is complete film files can be accessed by Specter for color correction or visual effects and 3D . The finished spot is output to a 24 fps D-5 universal master. From this master, any format HD and SD (NTSC) versions are extracted.