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Workflow Pipeline and tools: Part I By ED HEEDE Director/Special Projects Filmworks/FX www.filmworksfx.com Los Angeles VFX designers, the zone of artist responsi- bility does not usually bridge the entire workflow spectrum. Indie filmmakers aside, only a few people — directors and producers — stay with a project throughout the science and art jun- gle of a full cinema pipeline. The journey begins from script stage to M How streamlined workflows and gear help the process. design, construction, camera capture, editor- ial and VFX into DI, where results are recorded to film or conformed to digital. While the story end of the chain is mission critical, a project can obviously face chal- lenges from first to last (for more detail see full production arc chart on opposite page.). Advances in film production tools brought major transformation to a process that accelerated from the mid-1990s to the latest gathering stage of evolution. A practical workflow case in point for a full cine pipeline is where I work, Film- works/FX — a 25,000-square-foot produc- tion campus that’s home to several strategi- cally-allied companies. Filmworks/FX, New Deal Studios, CosFX, Stranger Comics and Filmworks Finishing Partners (a film finishing fund) work together in both service and content creation scenarios. Put another way, the Filmworks/FX campus services and orig- inates intellectual property through to pro- duction of A-list and independent films.The Filmworks/FX network is home to a film and digital camera capture department, shooting stages with services, back-lot, high-end CGI, a DI color correction theater (with 10-bit ost cinema pros make a life at a unique niche of the film pipeline process. For shooters, editors or shop foundation. And plug-in tools from Imagineer, GenArts, Red Giant and Cine- form have become nearly as critical to pipelines as their host apps. But as important as software has be- come, hardware is at the cusp of the new cinema watershed. At the forefront, Canon than opening a Word document. From 4K workloads to 3D renderings to composites showed similar gains. After Effects CS5 ran nearly 10 times faster on the HP Z800 systems at 64-bit vs. the old 32-bit platforms. Even pulling 4K frames off the server was surprisingly fast. Date Night:Filmworks/FX turned LA into Manhattan for this Steve Carell/Tina Fey film. with its 5D Mark II and 7D is the trend-set- ting poster child for an indie capture revolu- tion that is finding its way into studio work. More on this later… Advances in processing power also rep- resent a major benefit. Even so, many post facilities don’t immediately upgrade to the latest hardware/software packages. Reason: mid-project is a bad place to switch your pipeline. Early in the year, FilmworksFX maintained Windows XP 32 on most VFX systems. A 64-bit Win- dows 7 lab was adopted recently (between projects) for a major production boost across the board. An instance of this is the indie film Phase One, produced by Film- worksFX.We upgraded Maya li- censes to 2011 between projects. A 360-degree view of Filmworks/FX’s DI theater. digital and 35mm projection), telecine, de- sign production (set and miniatures con- struction) and scanning-recording. PIPELINE TOOLS Filmworks/FX maintains a full digital lab with software tools from a range of providers.The most relied on for 2D work is Adobe Creative Suite 5. Key among these tools would be After Effects with its Photo- 20 Post • January 2011 An Nvidia FX5800 accelerated HP Z800 with 32GB of RAM rendering a complex Autodesk Maya 3D scene took 20 minutes to render what had taken up to eight hours on 30, 32-bit processors. Phase One required a scene with high- resolution 3D models of cockroaches de- picted as hundreds of particles. HP/Nvidia hardware ran through the Maya simulation and rendering with no more apparent stress www.postmagazine.com 2K workflows performed like standard defi- nition footage, and RAM previews on multi- layer 2K files with keying and masks took seconds to load on the Z800. CULTURE & EVOLUTION HDSLR cameras have empowered new workflows for indie filmmaking via rapid image acquisition and VFX element capture. Cameras like the 5D and 7D can quickly capture an element for a VFX shot that would have typically been built in CG or that would have required substantial budget and production resources across a film shoot to get the proper resolution needed. Motion pictures shot on 35mm film still tend to work out of a scanned digital format at 2K (2048x1556) with sequenced DPX files.The offline editorial tends to be Quick- Time-based files at HD resolution (1920x1080) out of an Avid system or Apple Final Cut Studio (more on this in future in- stallments of the workflow series). If a film is cropping at 1:85 or 2:35, then the HD resolu- tion acquired on a camera like the 5D is only about six percent shy of being full frame. Filmworks/FX often shoots elements with the Canon 5D instead of creating conven- tional labor-intensive CG elements that