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Bavaria Film Taps ASSIMILATE Scratch

Bavaria Film purchases a company-wide site license for ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH and SCRATCH Lab, its advanced production dailies and VFX tool.

MunichGermany -- Digital workflow and post production technology developer ASSIMILATE announced that one of Europe’s largest production houses, Bavaria Film and D-Facto Motion, the creative house of Bavaria Film, have purchased a company-wide site license for ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH finishing software and SCRATCH Lab, its advanced production dailies and VFX tool. The goal of the SCRATCH purchase is for Bavaria Films and D-Facto Motion to standardize all their facilities on a single, streamlined and efficient data workflow throughout its production and post-production processes, from dailies to data management, conforming, and then through the entire post-production workflow, including conform, color grading, compositing, finishing and final output to a variety of formats. Together Bavaria Film and D-Facto Motion are predicting to finish over 125 TV movies, TV episodes, and feature films in 2013. Founded in 1919, Bavaria Films is known for its big blockbuster movies and film classics, such as The Sound of Music (1965),Cabaret (1972), Das Boot (1981) and Never Ending Story (1983), among numerous others.

Most recently, Bavaria Films and D-Facto employed SCRATCH Lab and SCRATCH for the dailies and full post-production of feature film Nils Holgersson, TV short series/episodes Tatort (distributed in over 40 countries), and TV movie Rommel.

TV Movie Rommel

Waheed Zamani, managing director / senior colorist at D-Facto Motion Munich, stated, "SCRATCH is an amazing system with many functionalities – absolutely everything a colorist needs and beyond. SCRATCH is highly customizable, which gives us the freedom and flexibility to make changes at every stage of the entire post-production process, and enabling us to achieve the highest level of results for the content and look of each project.”

Being Europe’s number one producer of TV movies and shows, Bavaria Films and D-Facto Motion faced the challenge of producing a huge number of projects simultaneously.  Over the years, the companies had used a variety of systems for film and digital projects. To support their high-growth ventures for TV and features, it became apparent that standardizing and streamlining processes with powerful and robust end-to-end workflow tools would avoid transcoding, which helps to ensure higher quality results, and would enable consistent quality and faster time to market, all while saving time, reducing maintenance costs, and lowering training costs for personnel.

Günther Farrenkopf, lead technical manager at Bavaria Film Munich, commented, “Since 1919 we have rarely experienced products that have catapulted us into the future. SCRATCH is such a product. SCRATCH streamlines the workflow, beginning with dailies, and it also integrates easily into every existing pipeline.  The ability to use off-the-shelf hardware makes maintenance and in-house support for SCRATCH viable, quick, and cost-effective.” SCRATCH tools have been so cost-effective and efficient for D-Facto that they are considered to be the number one creative house for movie and TV production in the German market.

Bavaria Films and D-Facto closely reviewed and considered nearly all the workflow tools on the market.  With a robust data toolset, SCRATCH emerged as the most complete dailies-to-finishing solution, as well as the most cost effective, with a superior price/performance ratio. Additionally many competitive products required costly proprietary hardware, which contributes to high cost of maintenance, whereas SCRATCH runs on high-performance off-the-shelf computers running on Windows and Mac OS X.

Tim Lücker, colorist / head of post-production at D-Facto Motion Berlin, noted, “SCRATCH delivers the speed and flexibility for working creatively – even when more than just grading is needed. It’s more than just a superb grading solution – it’s one rocket of a workflow backbone!”

“Years of experience and know-how has given Bavaria Production Services GmbH their strong, well-known name in the post market.  The combination of their knowledge and skills to produce high-end features, TV movies and episodes with ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH products, enables the looks and high-quality results that have garnered many awards and that are highly valued by the German viewing audience,” said Patric Breuer, CEO of Dreamwalks GmbH. “Dreamwalks is proud to be the only ASSIMILATE reseller in DACH, working closely with high-end post production customers like Bavaria Production Services GmbH to provide the products and support they need to achieve their desired results.”

Source: ASSIMILATE

Jennifer Wolfe's picture

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.

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