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BITS & PIECES www.postmagazine.com 9 POST MAR/APR 2020 CODEX MEDIA VAULT AT CENTER OF WHITETAIL PRODUCTION & POST JOSHUA, TX — Whitetail follows a broken family consisting of a father, an uncle, and the father's 15- year old son Donnie, as they embark on a weekend hunting trip in West Texas. Donnie's mother recently died of an overdose, and the trio hopes to get away from it all by being out in nature. Instead, they find a mysterious man, shot in the stomach, and clutching onto a backpack full of money. Producer and post supervisor Jason Starne says the Codex Media Vault (http://mediavault.codex. online) proved to be a valuable tool in the produc- tion of Whitetail. Media Vault served as a shared storage solution that allowed the entire production to collaborate with editorial, color, VFX, marketing and music/sound finishing in the making of the two- hour Southern Gothic narrative. "As a producer and post supervisor, I must say having the Media Vault on-set was crucial while making the film," says Starne. "I knew very well about Codex for its work with Arri, but what about Red? Could we still take advantage of the Media Vault even if we weren't using High Density Encoding? HDE would have been nice since we were shooting with two Red Weapon cameras, each capturing at 6K anamorphic with a 2X squeeze, from a 6.5 sensor crop (2:35:1 widescreen), using only 5:1 compression. Thanks to director Derek Presley's meticulous shot planning and storyboards, we only ended up with 10.4 terabytes total of origi- nal camera native files (OCN) for the 12-day shoot." According to Starne, the production workflow was simple: the A camera used DSMC2 and they were able to generate QT ProRes proxies directly in-camera, while the B camera was only the DSMC1. "We relied on Adobe Media Encoder for transcoding the .R3D files to 1920x788 QT ProRes proxy files to match the A cam proxies," he explains. Each shoot day, as the team broke for lunch, the data loader would ingest as much as 600GB of OCN from the Red magazines to the Media Vault. This never took more than 30 minutes thanks to the direct connected 10Gb Ethernet from the DIT's Windows-based laptop. "After the transfer of the B cam data, we would immediately start generating proxies while our 1st AC would use the second set of mags for the rest of the shoot," he explains. "At the end of each day we would swap mags and ingest another 500 to 600GB of new .R3D files and then be camera ready for the next morning. Plus, editorial would have ev- erything they needed from the previous day, ready to cut in Adobe Premiere." The Media Vault comes standard with four 10Gb Ethernet ports. In addition to the DIT loading the Red mags directly, they were even able to have the behind-the-scenes team ingest images and vid- eo through a MacBook Pro laptop, attached via a Sonnet Echo express unit using the 10GbE network connection. The BTS laptop was running Adobe CC, and the BTS team managed the occasional Photoshop and Premiere cuts for social media. All of this was happening while the senior editor worked on the main scenes without any hiccups or slowdowns. The editorial station, provided by CineSys-Oceana, was a purpose-built workstation, operating Windows 10 Pro, with an Intel i9 14-core 3.2GHz/4.4GHzTurbo chip, 128GB of RAM, and the Nvidia RTX2080 GPU with onboard RJ45 10GbE copper connections. With the .R3D files stored on the Media Vault and the extra workstation horsepower, they would often play with the ISO and Kelvin settings in Premiere for some look experimentation. The whole setup allowed the editor to quickly review takes and QC the scenes for continuity and lighting setups during the entire shoot. "As we know from the production side, the entire production relied heavily on the Media Vault for all camera Red file transfers and proxy creation," says Starne. "This allowed the senior editor, Amanda Hughes, to begin assembling scenes right away in the make-shift edit suite, which was actually a bedroom in the house that a third of Whitetail was actually filmed in." At times the editor would be reviewing footage and assembling scenes, all while the director was watching his monitor with the focus puller. "It got a little tight for sure, but the Media Vault proved the importance of having quiet gear on-set." Adobe Premiere was the tool of choice for edi- torial because "the relinking feature is so effortless, and the AAF export just conforms perfectly in Autodesk Flame, the online and finishing choice for VFX and final color," says Starne. After the shoot ended in late November, the por- table Media Vault moved to Starnes' home office, where editorial would continue through the month of December. The team achieved picture lock by the end of December. The editorial setup was configured with two lap- tops (edit and assist stations) running Premiere Pro. Autodesk Flame was used for VFX, with Autodesk Lustre 2020 used for the online and color on a purpose-built workstation provided by CineSys- Oceana. Taking advantage of the four direct connect 10Gb Ethernet ports on the Media Vault, the colorist and VFX team experienced excellent throughput to handle the post workflow. After final picture lock, the Adobe Premiere AAF was sent to the Autodesk Flame system, which conformed the camera OCN Red .R3D files at full 6K debayer on the fly, coming straight from the Media Vault. VFX shots were packaged and sent to Charlie Uniform Tango. The color grading was started in Lustre 2020 and rendered back into the Flame timeline. After picture lock, the offline was sent to the music composer Patrick Russell, and another offline copy with original audio and an OMF export was sent to Kevin Brown at KDB Entertainment, who handled the sound design and dialogue editing. "The experience has been amazing," notes Starne, "being able to keep all the data in a single sharable, portable container. We already have another project in the works, and we know that Codex Media Vault will take center stage."