Post Magazine

April 2015

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/491542

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 36 of 51

www.postmagazine.com 35 POST APRIL 2015 for online viewing and made two sets of LTO archives." This workflow wasn't unusual, Ciaccio says, but the challenge for Dig was to provide a system that was "portable, powerful and had the bandwidth to deal with some rather remote locations." No- mad was manned by a single operator/ colorist, Duck Grossberg, and was com- pact enough to be carried as luggage. Tapping Modern VideoFilm for on-set or near-set dailies makes particular sense when a TV production is remaining with the company for post finishing. "Our final colorist can work with the director and DP from the beginning to establish the look, then work tightly with the near-set colorist to make sure the look is followed from beginning to end," Ciaccio says. LIGHT IRON Light Iron (www.lightiron.com) customiz- es the workflow for its cart-style Outpost near-set digital dailies system and Lily Pad creative station to meet the needs of feature film and TV customers. Systems are typically run by production staff. "We have a very robust training sys- tem and are able to get people up and running on Outpost in a day," says Katie Fellion, vice president of operations at Light Iron. "We've invested in 180 hours of iBook training to give an overview of the process and workflow, and are working toward implementing Outpost Training Bars at Panavision locations." Outpost systems were deployed on the Will Smith romantic dark come- dy, Focus, on location in New Orleans, Buenos Aires and New York City. The film shot 1.85 anamorphic and was one of the first shows to make use of 12-bit recording. Arri Alexa cameras captured ProRes 2K 444 files; ArriRaw was re- served for capturing extensive green- screen segments. Outpost was first set up in the dailies trailer in New Orleans by Light Iron tech- nician Nick Lareau. Outpost was manned by dailies tech Sam Sullivan and Lily Pad by DIT Brandon Lippard. Sullivan took all the CDL values established by Lippard and ingested all the media — ProRes, Ar- riRaw, audio — into Outpost with meta- data and transcoded the deliverables: Vici Web dailies for the production office, ProRes 2K 444 files for Apple Final Cut Pro X editorial, Todailies for iPad and LTO tape archives. Using Light Iron's Live Play, an inte- grated system for on-set review and cloud distribution, creative metadata, such as performance reviews, notes on takes and scene tags, was merged with the master database for post. "It's always been the goal to use file-based tools to creatively move everything forward," says Fellion. "On Focus, we were able to take all the work information collected on-set and use it in editorial and beyond. It was one of the first shows to take all the piec- es and combine them, to demonstrate the potential of what creative metadata offers the pipeline." BLING The SIM Group's Bling Digital (www. simdigital.com) offers Dailies PODs — Post On Demand Dailies stations staffed and managed by experts from Bling Digital. They range from highly-mobile, suitcase-size set ups to full suite con- figurations for fixed locations; they are available from the company's Toronto headquarters and offices in Vancouver, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Beijing and Brook- lyn, which opened late last year. "We build out custom systems based on the customer's needs," says Gavin Barclay, vice president of Bling Services. "It's not one-size-fits-all. Customers call us early so we can provide what they need and create a custom workflow for them." Systems typically contain Colorfront Express Dailies software, or Blackmagic De- sign DaVinci Resolve, if required, along with monitoring and custom metadata software. The majority of Dailies PODs are deployed on TV shows, but feature films take advantage of the system, too. "We have PODs on 25 projects at all of our offices at the moment," says Barclay, who cites several TV pilots in Vancouver, a pilot in Atlanta, a series in New York, and a few movies in the pipeline. Some indie films use PODs on-set but, for the most part, PODs operate near-set in produc- tion offices or in one of Bling Digital's own facilities. NBC's new American Odyssey drama series had two units shooting simul- taneously in Marrakesh, Morocco and Greenpoint, Brooklyn. "We set up the workflow to have everything come back Light Iron's Katie Fellion (top right) says its Outpost system was used on the Will Smith film Focus (top left). NBC's new American Odyssey (below) drama relied on two POD systems from Bling.

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of Post Magazine - April 2015