Quantel hail 'Star Wars Episode III' as 'a blueprint for 21st Century film making'

'Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith' is set to make cinema history; not just in the box office but in its use of cutting edge DI technology.
Most impressive is the thousands of hours of work put in by the ILM team to create a movie that sets a new benchmark in film.
Fred Myers, ILM’s Principal Engineer, said: “We built a very efficient digital pipeline for Episode III which allowed us to get George’s vision for the project up on the screen in an interactive way. The technical scope of Episode III meant we couldn’t afford the delays of software/proxy based rendered colour correction, given the scale of editorial and the reality of so many complicated CG shots delivering in the final weeks of the post production schedule.
“Lucasfilm is all about innovation and pushing boundaries and the guys at Quantel share our vision.” Myers continued, ”On Episode III, iQ played a key workflow role in mastering the movie and creating the digital intermediate. It was the final stop in building the reels to assemble the film out and record the digital cinema master. It was used to create the ‘opticals’ – the digital wipes and dissolve transitions between the scenes, as well as to slot in last minute updates. All the HD and 444 deliverables, the theatrical trailers and many screening reels were run through iQ.
“We first used iQ on Episode II as a colour grading ‘hub’ in its very early form. The thing we really liked was being able to work with the actual 10bit RGB frames up on the screen. If we made changes while on the system, we could export them and move on, knowing the image integrity was maintained. As the iQ toolset grew we used it on more and more projects including restoration of ‘THX1138’ and the original Star Wars Trilogy," concluded Myers.
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