Blackmagic Design's DeckLink Pro capture card was used in the making of "We are the Strange," a 94-minute animation recently screened at Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
The full-length feature animation was produced, written and directed by M Dot Strange. The film is composed of mixed media consisting of 3-D, stop motion, and 2-D. Chaylon Blancett was brought aboard for post production.
Strange and Blancett used Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects 7 to create 1920x1080 Blackmagic 10 bit uncompressed movie files. In post, the final movies were exported as standard definition movies to be offline edited on an Apple G4 and a Mac Pro using Final Cut Pro 5. The online assembly was done using After Effects. The After Effects project files were then sent to an Apple G5 dual 1.8 with 4 GB RAM. Using the SD files as reference in Final Cut Pro, the uncompressed 10 bit files were then color corrected in After Effects.
The DeckLink Pro was used to preview the photo jpeg files for color correction purposes on both an analog CRT monitor and a DLP projector with SDI inputs.
Blancett, co-editor on the film, said, "With the DeckLink Pro, we are able to work with the highest quality formats while manipulating and finishing the project perfectly, without any loss of quality. We were not bound by the restraints of digital or analog signals. The use of the DeckLink Pro card made it easy to complete our vision for the movie because we were equipped with the right tools."
