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On-Set Post MonkeyButtVFX’s Craig Mumma: He recently worked on a Jay Z concert shoot in Las Vegas, bringing his Codex recorder on location. Powering High-Performance Audio & Video Workflows several reasons, including director Spike Jonze’s need to screen material at full resolution. This got him thinking. “[I] came in and said,‘Wow.There is some- thing to be said for digital and understanding it,’” re- calls Mumma. He spent some time re- searching technologies and workflows, and came across the company Codex.After sitting down with company co-founder Paul Bamborough, he de- cided to implement their recorder as the center- piece of his mobile system. This allowed him to From capture through distribution, ATTO powers high-performance audio & video workflows. Leading industry solutions rely on ATTO to provide reliable connectivity that is trusted by top audio & video professionals. You can now have the same technology that drives their success. offer realtime dailies. “At the end of the day, you had color-timed dailies and sync sound ready to be deliv- ered to studio executives, editorial and anybody else that needs it,” he explains. “It wasn’t the next day. It was right then and there!” Mumma started initially South Hall, Lower Level, Booth SL2510 www.attotech.com 36 Post • April 2011 www.postmagazine.com working on commercials, many of which were shot using Sony F23 and F35s, Vipers, the Dalsa, and the Arri D21. He even worked on a few television shows that were produced using Sony EX3s. “People were always skeptical,” he recalls of his early work. “Every job that I completed, they’d walk away saying, ‘That looks amazing.’” For him, the challenge was learning how to manage the different cameras and their media.“I recorded to Codex, SxS cards or internal media,” he explains. “I would say that 90 percent of my job was Codex-re- lated. I would manage the cameras, the video chain, on-set color, recording into my van. I would be that lab and back up every- thing, provide dailies, sync the sound and then hand everything over to the DI house at the end of the day.” Today, he defines his role as that of a dig- ital acquisition supervisor, overseeing the entire pipeline and managing it from cam- era through archive. “Let’s says it’s a stan- dard acquire, whether you have an on- board recorder on the camera, the Codex recorder, an SxS card, or even a CF card if we are talking Canon 5Ds or 7Ds. It’s a re- movable mag that you put into the front of the Codex. It’s got all different sizes, and supports all different kinds of different for- mats. It takes removable media, so you put it right in.” Prepping files for editorial falls on his shoulders. In an Avid workflow, he will use the Codex recorder and a Filmlight color station on-set to dial in the color. He has Panasonic, Cine-tal and Dreamcolor moni- tors for accurate on-set viewing.The color decision list (CDL) will be stored as meta- data, leaving the native files unaffected.“I am going to deliver MXF files most likely for the Avid media, and then we can decide on the quality that they want. Do they want low, medium or high? So they can [choose] de- pending on the speed of their system. I also hand off the original camera data on an LTO back-up or a FireWire [drive], and they can go do their editorial and it matches back to the original camera data for the assemble.” Final Cut Pro jobs will be delivered in the ProRes format, and editorial can select the quality level they choose to work in. In addi- tion, sync sound can be captured and deliv- ered from the Codex as well. Mumma has worked on numerous fea- ture films, including DreamWorks’ Real Steel, starring Hugh Jackman and scheduled for re- lease in October. “I was the digital acquisi- tion supervisor for that, so I oversaw the en- tire chain. I’ve also been involved in Narnia and Tron and Alice In Wonderland. Alice in Wonderland was one of the first [features] I was involved in.” At press time, he had just returned from Romania, where he spent five months on the set of Ghost Rider 2, where her served as stereographer and also over- saw the digital pipeline.