Smoke & Mirrors' sweet new grading suite.

New York- and London-based post house Smoke & Mirrors has developed two new color grading suites that will radically transform the process for both film and digital transfers. The brainchild of colorist Ben Eagleton – no stranger to innovating post workflows with his proprietary BEAN, which was the industry’s first purely data-centric commercial grading facility – the new suites are the first to offer three key innovations: all the footage from a job is scanned, rather than just selected takes; all of the footage is housed in a central hub, so all parties have access to it; and the footage is permanently archived and instantly retrievable.

“If you look at the old-fashioned way of doing it, you’d edit up to a day and a half before you needed to grade and regardless of whether you were happy with the cut or not, at some point you had to stop before your grade because the technical people had to get everything ready for the session,” explains CCO Sean Broughton. “When you get to the grading session, if you want to change anything at that point, you’ve got to stop your grading session and wait until you can get back in again with those scans, all at extra cost.”

Smoke & Mirrors’ grading suites do away with the inefficiencies and the extra costs while giving clients greater creative control. Every frame of footage is scanned and set in 2K, which means clients can pull new shots without the delays of a rescan. Moreover, they can work right up until the grade starts, and even during the process, refining their cut.

“We’ve made it so much more about the creative rather than the technical,” says Broughton. “It really does have huge benefits for creatives, editors and effects houses together.” Q

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