Clear Posts High-Speed Liquid Metal HD Hyundai Spot

Clear has completed complex HD post-production on the first ever commercial to use the 'Phantom HD' high-speed data camera.
The facility installed the latest version of the Flame visual effects system, Autodesk Flame 2007, to cope with the huge amount of data and to ensure the project finished on time.
Directed by Home Corp's Howard Greenhalgh for VCCP, the commercial relaunches Hyundai's three main cars: its coupe, 4 x 4, and town car. VCCP's brief was to show each car being born out of liquid metal - the 'essence of car' - a synonym for the quality that runs through every Hyundai model. The result is a breathtaking sequence of shots showing cars being formed from slow flowing metallic liquid. This was achieved by shooting model cars in giant tanks of silver paint using the Phantom HD camera.
The Phantom HD camera is currently the only available high-speed data camera that captures a true HD image at up to 1,000 frames per second, which was essential for the slow motion nature of the job. The project required a massive leap of faith by Hyundai because the camera was a prototype and no images were available to demonstrate its amazing potential.
Clear's head of 2D, Derek Moore, was visual effects supervisor on the three-day shoot and completed the visual effects work on Flame back in Soho. Over the course of four weeks, Derek graded and composited all shots. He made extensive use of camera tracking and morphing techniques to meld disparate shots into a fluid sequence, and used Flame's new warper to replace most of the model cars used in the liquid tanks with real Hyundai models from 35mm and digital still elements.
"We found the most effective way to make it look like a real car emerging from the liquid was to use the new warper in Flame," says Moore. "I would take a similar angle of the real car, then stabilise it with the warper. This left me with a static car but with moving lights and shadows. I tracked this over the top of the model car shot with the Phantom HD, and restored the liquid over the top of that. It was quite a bit of work, but I guess it was cheaper than writing off a fleet of Hyundais by driving them into gallons of silver paint!"
Moore said: "One of the biggest challenges we faced was the amount of data the Phantom HD produced. By the time we had collated all the footage we had over two terabytes of data. That's as much as we'd expect for a feature film! It pushed our storage and networking to the limit. In fact we had to install the very latest Flame suites from Autodesk in order to get the project done on time."
Home Corp's director Howard Greenhalgh, chosen for the piece because of his visual style and extensive experience with high-speed photography, said: "The Phantom HD is a huge improvement on the previous Phantom cameras. It's currently the only high-speed data camera that captures a true high definition image at up to 1,000 frames per second. It also has amazing colour depth and clarity, the like of which I haven't seen before."
(SP)