Katadata 1.1 Fixes/Features

• Faster Launch
• More Stable
• Smart Reset in the event of a crash
• Smoother Scrollers
• Updated Instructions Screen
• Allows music to play in the background

Added Devices
• iPhone
• GoPro HD
• Panasonic 3700 P2
• RED SCARLET
• Sony PMW500

Added Codecs
• AVCHD
• HDCAM SR
• P2

Additional Settings for existing devices/codecs
• Cineform
• DNxHD 444
• FS100
• HVX200
• HPX170

Fixed Calculations to reflect recording time on cards
• XDCAM
• DV/DVCPRO

New York City, New York – November 7th, 2011 – Like a well oiled machine, Katabatic Digital continually rolls out artfully produced high-end commercials, music videos, advertising campaigns. Recognized for its excellence in high-end post production for digital cinema, Katabatic has an established client base that keeps on growing. To manage the business side of its rapid growth, Seth Tabor has joined Katabatic Digital as executive producer.

As executive producer, Tabor will spearhead client services and business development. “Seth brings 15+ years of experience and knowledge in virtually all areas of production and post production, which enable him to help our clients get the best results for their challenging projects,” says Emery Wells, digital colorist and founder of Katabatic. “His strong organization skills honed in the development of numerous films, commercials, and music videos, as well as management positions, will be an asset in managing our clients’ projects, as well as our growing client base.”

Tabor cut his teeth in production prior to focusing full time in post and VFX. He held production and managing positions at Open Frame Productions and Curious Pictures before becoming the Managing Director/CFO at Quiet Man where he oversaw countless projects for clients such as Gillette, Proctor & Gamble, Pepsi Max, McDonalds, and GE.

“Emery Wells is committed to excellence in every aspect of post production and this has become the mantra throughout Katabatic.  He also has the foresight to carry this vision through to the management side of company as we expand our client services and continue to take on more complex projects,” says Tabor. “It’s an exciting time to be working in this industry and to be a player on such an innovative and talented team like Katabatic.”

Katabatic is at the forefront of the latest digital cinema technologies, offering its clients expertise in end-to-end creative, VFX, and post-production services for digital cinema in any format from any camera – 3D, RED Epic 5K and4K,  ARRI Alexa, Phantom, Canon SLRS, Sony F3, and more. ASSIMILATE’s resolution-independent SCRATCH software is he backbone of Katabatic’s post-production workflow.  Katabatic also offers the rental of RED Epic and 4K cameras, including on-set technical expertise.

About Katabatic Digital

Katabatic Digital (NYC) is a digital cinema company that blends creativity with technology to provide digital post production services for high-quality visual projects such as ad campaigns, music videos, and TV episodes. Katabatic works with any camera/format, and also provides rentals of the RED Epic and RED 4K cameras, including on-set technical expertise. ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH is Katabatic’s data workflow of choice for real-time post production, from conform, color grading, dailies, client reviews, through finishing. Katabatic’s portfolio includes high-end music videos and TV spots for Beyonce, Cee-Lo and Saturday Night Live, and advertising for major household brands, such as Google Wallet, Google Chrome, Vonage, Jaguar, Goldman Sachs, and more.  To learn more about Katabatic Digital, see www.katabatic.tv, or call 212-620-0818.

New York City, New York – October 31, 2011 – The new KataData storage and runtime calculator is an indispensable iPhone app for on-set, post production, and even non-technical positions. Emery Wells, founder of Katabatic Digital (NYC) – a grading, finishing, and VFX studio in New York City – knows this first hand. With the plethora of digital cameras and formats hitting the market, Wells developed the KataData app to alleviate all the pain in data planning and management for their post artists and lab technicians, as well as clients. And now, KataData is available to the broad spectrum of filmmakers and post-production facilities at the iPhone App Store for only $4.99.

KataData was built for filmmakers and post artists, supporting an extensive list of cameras, such as RED 4K and 5K Epic, Phantom, ARRI Alexa, Canon DSLR, as well as a wide range of codecs, such as DPX, Open EXR, DNxHD, and ProRes. KataData’s ease of use eliminates hours of calculations and frustration: just enter the amount of footage you have by file size (MB, GB, or TB) and KataData will calculate the runtime or storage. Or enter multiple calculations and add them together.

“For today’s apps, an intuitive user interface is a must have, so we’ve built in some cool features like swipe gestures to convert units and time code, and for RED camera users, it’s also easy to calculate stereo and HDRx options,” says Wells. “We’ll continue to add more features based on user feedback. If market demand is there, we’ll build it.”

What KataData Users Are Saying

Watch the quick demo below and learn why first users are singing its praises.

Director/photographer Vince Laforet: “KataData is an incredibly graceful app that allows you to take the mystery out of all of these camera calculations and avoid the inevitable headaches that come with.”
Jim Hare, Sydney Australia: “Absolutely brilliant! I have several multicam shoots coming up using RED Epics and R1s and this app will be essential for locking down REDcode ratios. Just bought it and downloaded. Fantastic!”
Jason Wingrove – Director/Cinematographer: “There’s simply not an app in existence that does what KataData does. Trust me, I’ve bought them all.”

Demo

Specifications
Available immediately at $4.99, KataData runs on iOS 4 or later. It’s designed for the iPhone, but will also run on the iPod and iPad. For detailed specifications and a full listing of supported cameras and codecs, visit www.katabatic.tv/katadata.
Download KataData on the App Store

About Katabatic Digital
Katabatic Digital (NYC) is a digital cinema company that blends creativity with technology to provide digital post production services for high-quality visual projects such as ad campaigns, music videos, and TV episodes. Katabatic works with any camera/format, such as RED Epic 5K and4K, ARRI Alexa, Phantom, Canon SLRS, Sony F3, and more and also provides rentals of the RED Epic and RED 4K cameras, including on-set technical expertise. ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH is Katabatic’s data workflow of choice for real-time post production, from conform, color grading, dailies, client reviews, through finishing. Katabatic’s portfolio includes high-end music videos and TV spots for Beyonce, Cee-Lo and Saturday Night Live, and advertising for major household brands, such as Google Wallet, Google Chrome, Vonage, Jaguar, Goldman Sachs, and more. To learn more about Katabatic Digital, see www.katabatic.tv, or call 212-620-0818.

When digital agency power house R/GA called us to help with a ‘top secret’ video, we had no idea what we were in for.  We soon found out that we would be pushing pixels on one of the most iconic scenes in the history of television, known the world over simply as  ”George’s Wallet.”  The task: to paint out all traces of the “guitar lessons” sign so it could be replaced with the Google Wallet sign.  All 5 shots (including reverse angles where the paper was see through) were completed in 10 hours.  Katabatic was launched in 2007 so we never had a fighting chance to work on the series when it was on the air, but if this is the closest we will ever come to working on Seinfeld, we’ll take it!

More Katabatic VFX Work

Something remarkable has happened to our industry over the past 4 years, an explosion of innovation!  Compared to other technology markets, the digital video market was relatively stagnant.  Major manufactures seemed to have a ‘good enough’ mentality and the barrier to entry was so high, they faced little to no competition.  Cameras were engineered in a black box.  Somewhere in Japan teams of engineers were toiling away at what they thought people wanted in a digital video camera.  I can attest with first hand experience that while these engineers are truly brilliant minds, they are so far removed from the reality of film making that it’s no surprise we were seeing a complete lack of innovation in the space.  Enter RED Digital Cinema, a company that had the capital and audacity to tell the industry giants “you’re doing it all wrong!”

That was several years ago and today, RED has shipped their second breakthrough camera, EPIC.  If you are asking yourself why you should care, read on, because this article was written for you, the indie film maker.

In 2007 you’d be hard pressed to name any films that were ‘finished’ in 4K – the emerging digital cinema standard.  The vast majority of theatrical films prior to 2009 were finished in 2K.  It wasn’t that it was technically impossible to finish your film in 4K prior to 2009, it just wasn’t financially practical.  Major Hollywood features have an incredibly complex post production workflow involving hundreds (if not thousands) of people touching the footage at various points in the process.  But it’s not just the source footage that has to be worked on in 4K, it’s all the CG and VFX.  Even a relatively modest Hollywood romantic comedy will have a surprising number of invisible VFX, all of which have to now be generated in 4K which is actually 4 times larger than 2K!  CG render time, storage costs, media transfer time, it all takes a significant hit to the schedule and budget!  If it’s too expensive for Hollywood, it’s surely too expensive for indies.  Or is it?

Indie film makers have a love affair with RED and for good reason.  They offer a digital alternative to 35mm at a price that is surprisingly accessible to indie film makers.  So how is it that RED makes a 4K finish accessible to indie film makers?  Surely all the cost that Hollywood incurs to finish in 4K would be applicable to indies, right?  Wrong.  RED has a secret weapon for indie film makers and it’s called R3D.  R3D is the RED file format.  It’s a RAW (but compressed) file format that makes working in 4K as easy as working with ProRes (presuming you are working with a facility that supports the RED workflow in a truly native environment).  So what’s so special about R3D?  If you are new to the world of “RAW” I suggest you read our primer on understanding “RAW” first.  The gist of it is, R3D makes 4K accessible and affordable.  The files sizes are small, they don’t require massively expensive disk arrays, and the file format is now generally universally supported across almost all major software products.  A single 4K frame from an EPIC camera in the R3D file format at a compression ratio of 8:1 is approximately 1.5MB.  That same frame as a DPX file would be roughly 36MB and as a floating point OpenEXR file it would be a staggering 108MB!

Hollywood films do not have the luxury of using the very tiny and easy to use 1.5MB frame because in a complex workflow they typically need to convert all the footage to a common format (usually DPX or OpenERX) and hence loose all the benefits of R3D.  You, my dear indie film maker, do not have that problem.  You can work natively with the R3D file format all the way through the last mile.  If you do have an odd VFX shot or two, it’s easily manageable in 4K.   The award winning indie film, The Exploding Girl directed by Bradley Rust Gray and starring Zoe Kazan and Mark Rendall was finished at Katabatic in 2009.  The film was shot on the first RED ONE camera in 4K resolution.  The Exploding Girl is a quiet narrative about a summer relationship.  No explosions or robots, alien invasions or apocalyptic disasters.  It may not be exactly like your film, but it likely requires exactly the same post services.  The Exploding Girl was conformed and color graded in our Assimilate Scratch system.  Scratch was the first color grading system to natively support the R3D format back in 2008 which meant all the workflow advantages could be fully exploited.  But The Exploding Girl was never actually fully finished in 4K.  After the conform and color grade (in 4K) we rendered out a 1080p Quicktime file to do the final assembly with titles, audio, and credits.  But because all the costly and time consuming bits were performed in 4K, if the time came to create a 4K deliverable, it would just be a matter of generating new titles, and creating a DCP (Digital Cinema Package – the theatrical digital delivery standard).  By shooting on the RED ONE, The Exploding Girl captured the highest quality digital image available at the time, and future proofed their investment.  The Exploding Girl went on to get distribution through Oscilloscope. Most indies can only dream of getting distribution and there is no sense in investing in all the upfront costs to finish in 4K if you have no guarantee you will ever need it.  By choosing your acquisition medium carefully and working smarter you can future proof your film for the highest level of success and put that savings on the screen where it belongs.

Disclosure – Katabatic rents Epic cameras but anyone that works with us can attest that we promote the right tool for the job and in our view, Epic is the tool if you are making an indie film.

Written by Emery Wells – Founder of Katabatic Digital

Multiple RED EPIC cameras are available for your shoot starting today at Katabatic Digital. In 2007, Katabatic was among the first in the world to own a RED ONE camera and over the past 4 years we’ve built an entire business around servicing and supporting the emerging world of digital cinema. Today, we have acquired our second Epic-X camera and it is available for immediate rental through our rentals department.

Base Epic Package:

Epic-M Brain with Titanium PL Mount
5″ Touchscreen LCD (machined)
5.6″ TV Logic – Full Version Multi-Format w/ accessories
DSMC Side Handle (machined)
DSMC Side SSD Module (machined)
4 X 128GB SSD cards
4 X RED Volt Batteries
4 X RED Brick Batteries
ET Studio Bridge Plate
REDmote (machined)
View Factor Full Metal Jacket Top Plate
View Factor Full Metal Jacket Bottom Plate
Wooden Camera A-Box
ET Studio Bridge Plate
RED Bomb EVF
Outrigger Handle
2 X ET speedy Clamps
1 X ET Battery Plate
2 X 18″ steel rails (19mm)
2 X 12″ steel rails (19mm)

Katabatic offers camera to completion services which include camera rental, dailies, color grading, and finishing.  Learn more about the Epic workflow.

Contact us today to check on rates and availability.

Since opening our doors in 2007, Katabatic.tv has now gone through it’s 3rd transformation. In today’s mobile world, iPhone’s and Android’s lay supreme so it was important that we jettisoned any dependance on Flash.  We scrapped everything we built for our previous website and went back to the drawing board.  The new and very much improved Katabatic.tv is now entirely HTML 5 and accessible across a wide range of mobile devices.

The redesign was a daunting challenge for our company.  Do we go sparse and focus purely on the creative or do we provide a more information rich experience about our process and technology?  Bringing these two philosophies together was they key objective for designer and creative director of Katabatic, Emery Wells.  The new site provides a wealth of information for our clients, including breakdowns of workflows for all the most popular digital cinema cameras as well as a stunning creative design that beautifully showcases our work while representing our brand.

The new work section uses a completely native HTML 5 player as default.  This means if you are using a browser that supports HTML 5, we will serve you HTML 5.  Flash is only used as a fall back if you are using an older browser that does not support a native HTML 5 experience. Our entire backlog of work has been re-encoded in 3 resolutions using our new Colorful™ web encoding service.  Colorful™ incorporates years of R&D in web encoding to provide a very high quality and, most importantly, color accurate web video.  As a company that specializes in color, you can imagine this service falls very close to our hearts.

Literally every section of the website has been re-worked top to bottom.  The K/Lab page provides a comprehensive overview of our bleeding edge digital lab service along with corresponding rates.  The workflows page offers a primer on exactly what ‘digital cinema’ even means.  Just want to learn more about us?  The new about section outlines our history, our difference, and our name.  So whether you are a prospective client, a producer, an editor, or a DP, there is something for everyone.

The award-winning singer/songwriter Rob Thomas has a well-loved string of hit singles and albums. His latest music video, Someday, was the #1 music video on Vh1’s Top 20 Countdown in early December 09. Director Alan Ferguson turned to Emery Wells at Katabatic Digital in New York City for the final color grading and finishing of the project, which was shot with the RED ONE 4K Digital Camera by DP Max Goldman.

“Katabatic gave us a ‘save the day’ experience,” says Ferguson. “We initially tried to do the grade at another facility that used traditional workflows and were having nothing but trouble. I did some research and found that Katabatic was the go-to post facility in NYC; these guys just get it. The venue for Someday was to be a bright, sunny, cheery day – the right background for expressing a love scenario. However, we had to shoot on a rainy, dreary day and Emery made the best of it. He went straight to work to layer the grading needed to cheer up the mood and clean up signage and artifacts. It was a big challenge and he came through for us with a wrap-up within two days.”

Ferguson adds, “I’ve used RED for ten other videos and have confidence in its capabilities. For this project, I needed a post house in NYC that had a proven RED 4K workflow for the color grading and finishing, as well as the artistic talent to create a great looking video. Large post facilities offered time-consuming work-around solutions, but Katabatic has a streamlined pipeline that works directly with the native RED CODE files. It was immediately clear to me that Katabatic has invested the needed time, money, and energy into building a stable data infrastructure for a RED 4K workflow. He also has an innate artistic sensibility and just the right touch to carry the emotion of scenes through color.”

Ferguson has a long history of directing hit music videos in several genres, working with big-name talent like Jewel, Jay-Z, Katy Perry, Chris Cornell, John Legend, and Natasha Bedingfield. Ferguson notes, “The venue for Someday is on the streets of New York City, and from experience I knew the RED camera would be ideal for shooting outdoors. I also wanted to use two cameras simultaneously to capture different angles, and the RED camera works well in tight spaces. Other considerations were our schedule and budget. By using RED for the data acquisition and then a digital post-production workflow at Katabatic, we were able to meet both targets.”

Emery Wells, digital color artist and founder of Katabatic, notes, “Data acquisition with the RED and other digital cameras is the trend now and it’s the de-facto future of music videos, commercials, and feature films. We’ve invested in the needed infrastructure and talent to give our clients a streamlined, digital post process that assures high-end results and low-level stress. With an end-to-end digital workflow, our clients realize they can do a shoot, and then have a color grade and finish that gives their project a look that is on par with 35mm film – all while saving time and money.They also have the advantage of creating several deliverables from a single source.”

NEW YORK, January 12, 2010

The web ads for the Google Chrome Browser are mechanical depictions of the human genius behind this highly sophisticated, yet simple-to-use browser. Each new feature of the browser has a story that’s told via an inventive contraption, reminiscent of a college chemistry or physics experiment. During the color grading, Katabatic Digital in NYC (www.katabatic.tv) enhances the browser for eight web spots created by 1st Avenue Machine for the BBH agency.

Aaron Duffy, a director at 1st Avenue Machine, notes “We faced several challenges with the Google Chrome spots that really inspired the team to do their best creative work. We wanted to produce something people never see; spots that trigger the imagination in all of us. Each spot features a unique, mechanical contraption with a home-made look to convey a specific product characteristic. All eight spots were shot digitally, using the RED 4K camera for high-quality imagery and the Phantom camera to capture the slow-motion effects needed within several of the spots. For the color grading, we needed to work with a digital pro knowledgeable in 4K and 3K formats; who offered a real-time, efficient post workflow; and who could easily accommodate the clients in the color grading sessions. Emery Wells at Katabatic is definitely the guy. He was able to handle all our requirements within their SCRATCH 4K grading suite.”

“We had a very short turnaround window on the Google Chrome project. We had eight spots to finish in one session, each with their own unique challenges,” says Emery Wells, digital colorist and founder of Katabatic Digital. “Our grading enviorment supports file-based workflows so we were able to take the files directly from editorial and get started right away. If they were shot on tape, we just wouldn’t have had the time to conform. Most spots required seven to ten layers of grading to accentuate the details, match the RED and Phantom cameras, and correct the colors for Google’s very well known logo. The spots were imported, exported, and color graded in a mixture of 1080p, 2k and 3K DPX, all of which we had the capability to review in real time.”

Wells adds, “Film had the same workflow for 75 years but in the digital age, every job has its own unique set of challenges. Our facility was started with this in mind and every tool we employ is built for handling the full spectrum of tapeless workflows. This allows us the advantage of offering very sophisticated and streamlined services, and most importantly, piece of mind for our clients because they can count on us to deliver on time and on budget.”

The eight web ads for Google Chrome were spearheaded by Steve Peck at the BBH Agency in New York City. The finishing was done at 1st Avenue Machine from DPX sequences. Flame and After Effects were used for the data management of 72 output files (eight spots, each in eight languages, and eight featurettes).

To view spot click here