Ashy731
Congratulations to Rob Legato and the makers of "HUGO" for taking home five academy awards last night including the award for visual effects! HP is proud that its technology aided the filmmakers in taking their creativity to a whole new level.
No matter how many customers I talk to, it never ceases to amaze me the kind of projects that are completed using HP Workstations. I recently caught up with Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor Rob Legato, who used an HP Z800 Workstation and HP DreamColor Display for his Oscar-nominated work on the film “HUGO.” It doesn’t get much more amazing than that!
Rob is a small business owner whose editing credentials run the gamut from “Titanic” to “Shutter Island” and “Avatar,” and who has worked alongside big-name directors such as Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis. During our chat he dished on everything from how his HP Z800 Workstation became the center of his editing process, to his opinion on advancements in filmmaking technology and his secret to editing Oscar-worthy films.
Jim Christensen: You’re already an Oscar winner, and you’re up for another one this year for your work on “HUGO.” What’s your secret to producing such high-quality work?
Rob Legato: Difficult to call it a secret, but it is putting the art and craft of storytelling first regardless of the difficulty and technique. Once you determine what is best for the movie, it is a matter of finding the most efficient way possible to streamline the creative process of that particular technique to allow for multiple iterations and the spontaneity of better ideas along the way.
JC: What’s something that people might find surprising about the way you edit?
RL: Probably that editing is the absolute hub of my work. No matter what the shot is, it is always placed into an edit of some sort to ensure it works dramatically in context. Every iteration is also placed in the edit and massaged one way or another until it works as well as I would have hoped—or in some cases works better than I planned. Also, I do this myself as I find that only a hands-on approach allows me the freedom to explore, and sometimes to find a happy accident along the way.
JC: How did you incorporate the HP Z800 Workstation and DreamColor displays into your workflow on “HUGO?”
RL: The Z800 became the gateway to the multiple platforms I like to use during a production. I believe that any program or operating system you are most comfortable with is the one that you should use regardless of personal platform preference. It allows you to use a much wider variety of tools that spark ideas and workflows that become ideally suited for your particular project.
On “HUGO,” every frame of footage for the entire film was captured on the Z800 and distributed to the Mac and Linux platform BASELIGHT. The speed of the machine and its ability to network easily to the other machines made it central and the anchor of the show.
The DreamColor displays created a standard that could be used in every workstation in multiple locations. The color reproduction and fidelity made it crucial to the proper judging of the high resolution and extended range of the material. In short, it was dependable and the last step in checking the quality of the image.
JC: How did your experience with the Z800 compare to other workstations you’ve used in the past?
RL: The sheer speed and flexibility of the design of the machine became the new benchmark—it is state of the art. Other workstations simply don't favorably compare.
JC: How have the HP Z800 and DreamColor display changed the way you work?
RL: Like I have stated before, the Z800 became the hub of other systems and central to the workflow. Once I used it in one location, I required it in every location to ensure the same ease of use and flexibility I became accustomed to.
JC: When your work is going on the big screen, how important is the display you use during the editing process?
RL: It is crucial that it be the best and most quality oriented display you can find. You find that you can envision the translation to big screen fairly quickly if you have one dependable way of viewing material.
JC: Has the growth of 3D affected the need for workstation performance during the editing process? How so?
RL: Performance for 3D necessitates the fastest and most robust system you can find to keep up with the data rate. A lesser system can't keep up as you are processing two streams with multiple effects on each.
JC: What would you say has been the technological development that’s affected you the most? As a small business owner, how do you keep up in an ever-changing industry?
RL: Performance for making real-time creative decisions has become the standard. We all keep looking for seamless ways to view greater file sizes and resolutions in real-time that we have become accustomed to standard definition proxies. We need a workstation that not only works now, but for the next generation of optimized programs that are continually being developed.
JC: What was the most technologically challenging aspect of creating “HUGO?”
RL: Keeping up with the art and skill of the other departments and collaborators on the film. They are so talented and raise the bar so high that it demands your work be of the same caliber. Also, the creative task of paying homage to the genius of the past while at the same time looking forward to the genius of the future of filmmaking.
For more behind-the-scenes conversation about "HUGO," check out this interview with Oscar Dailies.
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