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March 2014

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www.postmagazine.com Post • March 2014 23 Sony Pictures' upcoming film, The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Its Colorworks facility serves as a single repository for production and post assets. Post has noted recently, the digital intermediate industry's specific niche on the wider digital filmmaking landscape has radically veered away from the original meaning of the term itself, since the "intermediate" stage involving working in the digital realm and then returning to film is no longer the industry's preferred methodology. Now that all-data workflows throughout the post chain from dailies onward, regardless of the original image capture format, are becoming increasingly sophisticated and yet more accessible at virtually all levels of filmmaking, it is growing increasingly difficult to view the term "DI" anymore as anything but a generic umbrella term for a wide range of digital mastering and data management services that facili- ties are offering movie and broadcast clients in various combinations, depending on their particular creative needs and resources. Today, a wide range of companies are finding innovative ways to liberally intermingle these DI offerings with other services that used to be separate entities, such as digital dailies and other on-set solutions, film restoration services, editorial and VFX work, re-mastering, and more. Lines have blurred, in other words, and what was once considered a specialized ser- vice in which material shot on film was scanned into the digital realm to be digitally color corrected and conformed before being printed back out to film for distribution and exhibi- tion is now part of a larger, constantly evolving digital paradigm shift, albeit an extremely important part. "I think 'DI' today should really be called more generally 'mastering,'" says Bill Baggelaar, senior VP of technology for Sony Colorworks, the digital intermediate and restoration facility on the lot at Sony Pictures Studios. "There is a lot more than just coloring pic- tures going on today. At Colorworks, we have built an integrated digital pipeline for the studio, and color just happens to be at the end of that chain." Colorworks is an example of a major studio-owned facility that also offers ser- vices to industry clients outside of Sony. As such, its business model may differ from some others, as it continually upgrades and expands a highly sophisticated data foun- dation that is permanently linked to the larger Sony empire, as we will discuss below. But other major, well-known industry players are also evolving in their own ways, with major announcements from some major names likely by NAB this year. Growth, change, and evolution, in fact, are now constants at facilities of all levels of size and scope, as they work strategically to keep up with continually-shifting ground on issues like 4K, on-set services, higher frame rates and dynamic range, stereoscopic imagery, color data management, com- bining services, amortizing expensive equipment, and much more. The following is a look at four different types of facilities and what they are up to on this new industry landscape in advance of NAB 2014. SONY COLORWORKS Bill Baggelaar describes Colorworks as having been "built from the ground up" to handle 4K from acquisition through mastering, and emphasizes the company has strategically dedi- cated itself to building a large-scale storage infrastructure for secure sharing of digital assets for production, post, visual effects, and digital intermediate work alike. The company offers clients the ability to coordinate digital dailies, deliverables, storage, and image security during production, along with remote access to data by all relevant departments from what Bag- gelaar calls "a single repository" that he suggests should be thought of "as a digital lab." In this sense, there is no attempt to distinguish DI, per se, as something separate or unique — Colorworks views the service as part of a larger paradigm. "We are continually developing our integration with the wider Sony Pictures Production Backbone," he says. "This is where we keep the pieces of data that we collect, whether up front from the set, or from the dailies process, from all camera sources, all metadata, the actual dailies themselves, visual effects — we keep and link them together in the repository so that everyone can see and reference them, and pull and send frames, whether in house at Sony or out of house. Streamlining the whole process has been a big part of what we have been trying to do in terms of transitioning from the traditional DI role." In keeping with the theme of integrating DI into larger programs, Sony's ongoing 4K/UHD initiative, which began in 2012 with an agenda to have Colorworks remaster 80 to 100 library Umbrella

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