JACK JONES ON THE HP ZBOOK STUDIO G7
Senior Colourist and CTO at Roundtable Post Production, Jack Jones is a declared technophile. Working with Escape Technology, Jones has just built a second cutting-edge picture and audio finishing house with HP workstations and monitors across the site. So, we lent him the new HP ZBook Studio G7 laptop to review
DCPs at 120 frame per second. We have invested in DreamColor monitors in
Roundtable Post Production is a boutique full-service picture and audio post company based in Central London specialising in high-end documentaries.
Roundtable has carved out an enviable reputation as a go-to post house for independent feature documentaries with credits including: Whitney: Can I Be Me and Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love both feature documentaries directed by Nick Broomfield; and Noah Media Group’s Finding Jack Charlton and Bobby Robson: More Than a Manager. They are currently finishing an Amazon Originals documentary series. With ever-increasing demand from their returning customers, Roundtable has taken on a second building around the corner from their original base which they have just fitted out to the highest specifications.
Roundtable Post Production offers a full suite of services, both on premises and remotely, including colour grading with Baselight and Nucoda, sound mixing including Atmos, voice-over, offline editing, online with Flame, archive restoration, feature film finishing, DCP mastering, LTO archival and Alchemist standards conversion.
roundtablepost.co.uk
“You’ll find HPs throughout our facility. Through Escape Technology, we’ve got to know HP a lot better and with the recent expansion into our second building, we’ve now invested in a lot more HP workstations.
HP is a core part of our infrastructure; they’re powering our onlines and
our finishing suites and Z monitors as GUIs for our offline suites. You get incredible pictures off them. And importantly you can calibrate them to a colour accurate standard which is vital for the work we do.
First impressions
I love technology. I grew up working on early Windows PCs and that evolved into a love of anything technological.
AS YOU WOULD EXPECT FROM A DREAMCOLOR. IT’S ON A LAPTOP. IT’S PERFECT.
you’ll find their monitors all the way throughout the facility as well. To me, HP represents high quality hardware
with a nice aesthetic. The build quality of the systems is fantastic. Particularly the Z8s. It’s important to be able to access the components of those machines if you’re replacing or upgrading, which is a core requirement for any facility. If you want to upgrade the CPUs, the RAM, the internal hard drives, anything, you can just swap them out. We’ve got HP Z8s powering our Flames as
well as our Baselights. The HP Z8 performance is just second to none for our Colorfront system - it’s just lightning fast. You can be rendering
IT’S A BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL DISPLAY,
The first things I consider when I’m looking at a new piece of kit are how it can function well for me, see the limits of it, and what I can potentially get out of it that I wasn’t expecting. And to see if it was going to be the right kind of thing for us
My first impressions of the ZBook Studio G7 was that it was an absolutely stunning device; aesthetically pleasing and surprisingly light for a workstation. I was blown away by how light it actually was compared to things I’ve historically used for this type of work.
Dreaming in colour
As a colourist, when I first opened up the laptop, the obvious first thing to look at was the screen. The colours on the screen are just stunning. It can achieve P3, it can hit 600nits. It’s a beautiful, beautiful display, as you would expect from a DreamColor. It’s on a laptop. It’s perfect.
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