We used to think that HD was difficult, then it was 2k and now 4k is the new goal in moving picture shooting & film post production (well I suppose 4k3D but I’ve not heard it mentioned much yet).
So what’s the latest? Well before I delve into that, here’s the background…
A couple of years ago I worked on the Midnight Transfer ‘DI From Day One’ project. This , at the time, was pushing at the edge of what was easily achievable. Not bleeding edge perhaps, but certainly leading edge stuff.
The aim was to create a complete rushes to graded master workflow in full 2k resolution. Until then all the grading that had been done on the dailies during the shoot, with the DoP was lost when it came to the final grade. Midnight’s idea was to create rushes in such a way as to preserve the grading information to give at least a starting position during the final grade.
The component parts were all in existence, or nearly so. Thomson’s Spirit 4K telecine/scanner had been around for a while, Filmlight’s Northlight scanner had been around too, for a little while.grading tools, such as Lustre and Baselight were established products with NuCoda’s product nearing readiness. SANs we plentiful, there was a fair choice of projectors and a couple of grading quality monitors to consider.
The only problem was overall system performance. The whole DI From Day One process requires speed. Every process had to be real time, or faster, to ensure that the daily rushes could be made and delivered to set on time.
Parallel operations, such as scanning, grading, sound syncing and playout to tape deliverables must not interfere with one another or reduce the system performance. The difficulty was no one else had done this in the UK in quite the same way.
There were bigger SANs (though ours at around 100TB was certainly big for the time) used in the graphics world which didn’t need our high data throughput and there were faster SANs, but these were all single operations that weren’t moving such large files in and out simultaneously.
The choice came down to who could demonstrate: a) a minimum of 2 streams of real time 2k data in and out of their system and b) persuade us that they really understood the workflow we wanted to build.
In the end DVS won the contract to supply both their incredibly flexible Clipsters and their just launched (and then still in development!) DVS-SAN.
One of the key enablers was Thomson’s Bones, the Linux based link between the fast Spirit 4K and the SAN.
Midnight were able to use the functionality within Bones to achieve the essential dailies throughput whilst allowing the two grading rooms to pull material for grading from the SAN without compromising the rest of the operation.
Anyway, with a bit of arm twisting, careful analysis of the available building blocks, the DI From Day One concept was achieved and has been running smoothly ever since. (see the press release from the time press release from the time:Digital Cinema Report).
But what of 4K? Since the Midnight project was launched, the DCI has specified the full 4K workflow and it is the new gold standard for new facilities. If I was doing Midnight in 4K what would need to be different? Is everything 4kish off the shelf now? What implications are there for pulling these much larger files around?
I will be investigating these issues over the next few weeks. Stay tuned and feel free to comment!
Tags: Digital, intermediates, DI, film, grading, thomson, grassvalley, spirit 4k, northlight, filmlight, baselight, dvs, clipster, midnight transfer, 2k, 4k, DCI, Bones
