Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/491542
www.postmagazine.com 36 POST APRIL 2015 ON SET, NEAR SET DAILIES to our Brooklyn office," says Barclay. "We sent a workflow producer to be our eyes and ears on the ground in Morocco," a location that posed Internet challenges. "The only place with enough bandwidth was a data center in Casablanca, about three hours from Marrakesh," he explains. A full, suite-style Dailies POD lab was built out next to the production office in Marrakesh. "Every night media came back to us to transcode. We put every- thing on drives and drove them back and forth to the data center in Casablanca," says Barclay. "There, they'd plug in the drives, and our Marrakesh lab would re- motely control their computer to upload dailies for NBC to review and for the editorial office in LA, which was cutting on Avid. All the dailies were available by 9am local time in the US." A Dailies POD operated out of Bling Digital's Brooklyn office for the Greenpoint shoot. Other customers may not have the same logistic and bandwidth challeng- es as American Odyssey, but they also appreciate how Dailies PODs take care of business, especially in areas where there's no big post production presence or where near-set configurations elimi- nate the need to battle city traffic to get to post facilities, notes Barclay. TECHNICOLOR Technicolor (www.technicolor.com) has developed what David Waters, vice president of On Location Services, calls, "the most powerful remote dailies system in the world." On Location Services is responsible for dailies globally: in the field, in Hollywood and at the company's facilities around the world. Technicolor's flagship four-computer, near-set system runs on a SAN; a sep- arate Linux database server drives the Colorfront core engine. Thanks to distrib- uted rendering, once the first camera roll is ingested into the system, color correc- tion is performed, sound is synchronized and metadata is collected, the camera roll is submitted to render. The process repeats for the second camera roll as the third camera roll is ingested and so on. "That way you get through six or seven hours of material in eight hours, not 18," says Waters. "We've automated all the processes not subject to operator decisions; we've tried to get the comput- er and database system to do as much thinking and as much work as possible." Technicolor's proprietary dailies software uses auto loaders to automate LTO back up. "The archive is the most precious asset of our client," Waters says. "After everything has been copied and ingested onto the SAN, the operator clicks a button and the software runs the ingest app that makes an MD5 of the material then writes it to LTO tape." A process that used to consume valuable operator time — often at the expense of sleep — can run overnight. It verifies the quality of the tapes and prints a report for the operator to have the next day. Clients of the system span feature films and television; 70 projects were tal- lied for 2014, including Birdman, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Night at the Museum 3, True Blood and Scandal. Some shows choose to put a different color correction system, such as Resolve, on the front end to render files with full color correction for post. Technicolor also supported a new Netflix series, Sense8, with three por- table Flex dailies systems as the show moved around the world, shooting two weeks at a time in Chicago, San Fran- cisco, Reykjavik, London, Berlin, Seoul, Mumbai, Nairobi and Mexico City — often concurrently. The three systems have single computers, RAID storage, LTOs and peripherals. "The Sense8 systems were built on wheels and were self-contained dailies colorist stations with pop-out monitors so they set up quickly and could be moved and shipped quite easily," Waters explains. "To ensure that multiple DPs could see what their colleagues shot at different venues, we had a secure account for stills review at each location. And we were able to merge and update the database for consistency across the board." MTI FILM Cortex Dailies is a complete dailies solution for episodic programming and features available in several configura- tions from MTI Film (www.mtifilm.com) for on-set, near-set and facility use. Cortex software is at the heart of an all-in-one, turnkey CarryOn system. Cor- tex also is available for installation on a full cart system; the software offers copy and verify functionality, built-in color management, and metadata manage- ment via the Cortex Manifest file format. In a partnership with EPS-Cineworks, Cortex software powers its DCD (Digital Cinema Dailies) system. It is deployed on both episodic television and features; TV credits include Adam DeVine's House Party on Comedy Central; Jennifer Falls on TV Land; Yahoo's first scripted series, Sin City Saints; and A&E's Bonnie & Clyde miniseries. MTI Film's own Cortex system has been used for dailies on the cable western mystery series Longmire for the last three years; Season 4 will debut exclusively on Netflix later this year. Amy Hawthorne, product manager at MTI Film in Los An- geles, says Cortex Dailies is a "very flexible system," and the workflow standardized for Longmire, which shoots in New Mexi- co, is very efficient and foolproof. "We have two Cortex Dailies systems on Longmire. One is on-set and is operated by a DIT; it does copy and color but no synch- ing," says Hawthorne. "It then exports Cortex Manifest files to the other system, which is located near-set in the production offices where synching and rendering is done. The Manifest identically reproduces everything done on-set, making near- set activity basically a continuation of the same session. A remote application enables our colorist in LA to do full dailies color on the near-set system." Next, Cortex Manifest files are shipped Technicolor's remote dailies system (above) is used on TV shows such as ABC's Scandal (below). MTI Film's Cortex Dailies solution.