Liquid blue Makes the Volkswagen Touareg Look Good.

Extreme driving maneuvers of Dakar winner Jutta Kleinschmidt in the VW Touareg offroader, recorded and staged by Novalis GmbH with Liquid blue. Shiny cars in beautiful surroundings – the production company Novalis had staged these productions for its customer VW again and again over seven years. But the marketing strategists at VW wanted to show the Touareg offroader filthy: off-road and with Jutta Kleinschmidt, winner of the Rallye Paris–Dakar 2001, at the wheel.

“Jutta Kleinschmidt was really explosive – swirling dust, rocks and meter-long jumps,” recalls Norbert Vander, managing director of Novalis GmbH. The recording was done in DVCPro 50 on the land of a brown coal strip mine near Cottbus. The action shots were supplemented with everyday driving situations. The original plan was for only an interactive operator’s guide, but the Novalis team wanted to come up with something more for its customers.

AJ-D-910 cameras with Fujinon optics were used for the 16:9 shots. The DV25 shots from the finger cameras on the vehicle were viewed on a Liquid purple DV system and transferred to the server in the studio. Thanks to that preparatory work, it was possible to make extremely efficient use of the outstanding capabilities of Liquid blue. The two programs are fully compatible with each other, so that the media management of Liquid blue was able to take over the pre-selection made under Liquid 1:1 and continue processing it. The immediate access to the DV clips together with their metadata made digitization, viewing and preliminary cutting possible already during shooting.

The requirements were demanding: A total of a terabyte of online quality video data had to be managed in various sub-projects. Unforeseen changes were needed right up to the end, under extreme time pressure. Peter Dohr, who was in charge of cutting, remembers: “Liquid blue’s media management worked very reliably, in spite of the enormous quantities of data. The great variety of tools and functions are really a help in projects of this magnitude.”

The investment in high quality paid off in the end: The Novalis team was able to get VW excited about the material, which was drawn on numerous times for media reporting and for advertising spots, trailers and events.

Novalis GmbH employs a staff of 16 in photography, interactive media and video productions, primarily for the automotive and fashion industries. The company’s studio, with over 1,500 square meters of space, is used for productions in DV, DVCPro 50 and DigiBeta. The non-linear cutting is performed over a network with Liquid blue and Liquid purple systems and a total of 2 terabytes of memory. The studio’s technical equipment – from the MAZ to the cutting system to the network – comes from the system supplier KST Moschkau, Broadcast & Professional Media Department, in Düren.