Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487667
Winter 2023 – LOCAL695.COM 55 who serves as a Media Server Supervisor and whose storied work history includes titles like Solo: A Star Wars Story and Top Gun: Maverick. Jason served as the Media Server Supervisor on Bullet Train, where he was responsible for overseeing the implementation of the LED wall systems that allowed Director David Leitch to achieve his vision for the film. For this production, the team made use of a video wall system built by Sweetwater, with the Lux Machina team taking responsibility for ingesting and playing back assets to the wall. On set, Jason operated a series of media servers in order to sequence and ingest clips into the system. The LuxMC team made use of a media server to play assets provided by production back to the LED wall. That resulted in an interactive image that synchronously worked with the camera department. "It's almost like video editing," Jason told me when we spoke. "Even though the art team sends over the files, you need to be able to manipulate them in the system." Drawing from experience on other productions like Solo, Jason and his team utilized what is called a Disguise Media Server (formerly called the D3 Media Server), which includes an integrated generative content creation platform called Notch. Once assets were converted into Notch's proprietary Notch LC file codec (which required a top of-the-line Ryzen Threadripper transcode machine in order to process the large and unbelievably dense files), the system was capable of making on-the-fly adjustments to scale, position, luminosity, and coloration of the picture. "Thankfully, we'd already worked out most of the kinks in-house and on projects like Solo and Mandalorian, so the workflow was pretty refined coming into this one," Jason explained. This had confused me. "Was Solo a video wall shoot?" I asked.