Park Road Post Relies on SGO’s Mistika for The Hobbit

New Zealand-based Park Road Post Production has selected SGO’s Mistika for the majority of the stereo and DI work on Peter Jackson‘s two-film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit. Mistika now forms the backbone of Park Road’s stereo 3D infrastructure producing dailies for editorial, finishing and grading.

Mistika plays a major role in the workflow of all Park Road stereoscopic work, including rushes preparation, stereo adjustment, color grading and EDL conforms for screening.

“This is such an exciting time, Park Road is an amazing facility and we are working on one of the most important motion pictures being filmed right now in the world, and Mistika and SGO are part of it,” said Mistika operator Francisco Cubas.

The facility currently hosts a total of six Mistika 4K workstations. Weta Digital, which is handling visual effects for both films, also has a Mistika workstation.

“We had some very specific and extremely difficult challenges to overcome leading up to the beginning of The Hobbit principal photography,” said Dave Hollingsworth, head of picture at Park Road. “After seeing the Mistika last year and hearing about SGO and the development team, we decided to use the Mistika as the hub for our new digital rushes workflow. There was no other system that could deal with turning around stereoscopic Red Epic high frame-rate material in the time frame and with the quality that we needed. Working very closely with SGO alongside developing our own proprietary software we have achieved something that is quite incredible and beyond cutting edge.”