SGO’s Mistika was used by high definition and stereoscopic 3D specialist facility BTV to grade and online the latest BBC Two television series titled James May’s Toy Stories which features ambitious world record-breaking projects. BTV’s Senior Colourist and Online editor, Ross Copeland used Mistika for the entire project.

The series covers how award-winning Top Gear presenter, James May is out to prove why traditional, old fashioned toys are still relevant today when he pushes them to the limit in spectacular, supersize challenges.  During the series, James May makes a full-size Spitfire out of Airfix;  creates a plasticine garden; races two scalextric cars around the old Brooklands race track; links two towns with the world’s longest model train set; builds a life-size bridge out of Meccano and builds a full-size house out of Lego.  Commissioned by BBC Two from Plum Pictures, the programmes were produced by Stuart Cabb and Will Daws.

BTV post produced the entire series including online editing, colour grading, audio mixing, mastering, QAR and deliverable creation.

A post production workflow combining SGO’s Mistika and Avid’s Media Composer was used to prep each episode for grade and mastering. Mistika’s capability of natively working with Avid media in real time, allowed for online and grade to be completed without the need to return to tape until master creation. A film look was then applied using the Snell & Wilcox Alchemist.

Mistika Artist, Ross Copeland explains “ With some grading systems the big issue is render time at the end of the session which can make you think twice before applying too many treatments like shading and vignettes. Mistika works in realtime with no rendering so you can apply as many free vector secondary grades, windows, tracked shapes, keyframed animated grades, rescales and so forth, as you want to, and it will just play out.

I also put Mistika to good use in the Scalextric episode to help focus the attention on the cars on the track and to fix some issues inherent with that type of location filming. Being resolution-independent, Mistika can play files of any resolution. The Hornby episode had some animating map graphics that were supplied at over four thousand line resolution. I needed to add a zoom in and out of these graphics as they animated and Mistika’s re-interpolation function worked nicely for that. Mistika has definitely provided the ability to create a more polished result.“

The series is currently airing on BBC Two and on iPlayer as follows:

Lego –   Sunday 20th December

Airfix –   Monday 21st December

Plastine –  Tuesday 22nd December

Meccano –  Wednesday 23rd December

Scalextric –  Thursday 24th December

Hornby –  Friday 25th December

For further information, please contact SGO.