Accom AFFINITY Cuts Elephant Relocation Documentaries
for Discovery Channel
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 14, 2001 Susan Simon
Accom, Inc.
Marketing Communications Manager
Tel: 650-328-3818 Ext.231
MENLO PARK, California — South-Africa based FC Hamman Films are using Accom® (OTCBB: ACMM) AFFINITY™ to produce a series of documentaries for Discovery Channel charting conservationists' attempts to rebuild the elephant population of Angola after the country's devastating civil war.
Initiated by the University of Pretoria, the Kissama Wildlife Foundation and the Government of Angola the five-year Project Noah coordinates assistance from Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa in an effort to repair the damage done to wildlife populations by the conflict, during which entire populations of many species were wiped out.
Concentrating on the elephant relocation program in Angola's Kissama National Park, FC Hamman began shooting in September 2000 as the first family group of 16 elephants was airlifted to its new home. "It's a very involving subject for a documentary, but because we are dealing with animals, schedules are constantly being revised and we need to be able to respond to developments quickly," Hamman explained. Shooting with a crew of five, Hamman moves from location to location as events unfold, returning to the company's Johannesburg studio to edit the footage.
"We can jump on a plane at short notice, get the footage and start editing soon after. AFFINITY works perfectly for us under these circumstances because it's so fast. That helps with the tight schedule of course, but it also means we feel free creatively: we can keep working at the pace we want because we don't have to wait for effects to render."
The documentaries are being shot with a variety of cameras, so Hamman places special emphasis on AFFINITY's color correction tools: "We had miniature cameras in the elephants' crates during the first airlift and it's vital to get a good color balance with that footage to match the rest. You even find color shifts between similar cameras on a 3-camera shoot because of angle of the sunlight in some of the locations."
AFFINITY's enhanced color correction option adds powerful real-time RGB and YUV space color correction for both the background and overlay (or real-time FX) tracks, with real-time operation on all correction parameters.
Apart from wildlife documentaries, FC Hamman Films also produces music videos, television series and commercials. "As a director of photography, I like to tell stories," said Hamman, "and we try to do that in every form of production. Even in documentaries now, we are creative in our storytelling, cutting out of sequence, using flashbacks and so on. It's so easy to do this with AFFINITY because you can work in real time all the time. When we have editors who are familiar with other non-linear systems, they can't believe how fast AFFINITY is. And the quality of the effects and keying is so good we've even have clients coming in just to use AFFINITY's keyer."
About AFFINITY
AFFINITY is a powerful high-end editing system with real-time video and key on background and overlay tracks, real time titles, Abekas®-powered frame-based Dveous™ warps, lighting and textures, 100 layer single-pass compositing with interactive full-motion alpha keys. With files stored in native QuickTime™ format, providing seamless interchange with all leading graphics and effects applications, and unprecedented low storage costs, including a SAN option, AFFINITY offers greater power, flexibility and value than any other non-linear editing system.
About Accom
Accom, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, designs, manufactures, sells, and supports a complete line of digital video production, disk recording, and editing tools for the professional worldwide television production, post production, broadcasting, and computer video marketplaces.
For more information, visit the Accom web site.
International press, please contact:
Richard Ashton
MCA Communications
PR and Marcom
Voice: +44 1353 652920
Fax: +44 1353 652921
richard@mca-communications.com |
