Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6359
10 Post • January 2010 www.postmagazine.com Bits & Pieces at a glance... Editor CHRISTOPHER NELSON , whose credits include the television series Lost and Mad Men, presents the keynote at the 5th annual Editors Retreat (www.editorsretreat.com), taking place in Miami this month.The four-day re- treat at the Deauville Beach Resor t Hotel gives accomplished editors a chance to participate in discussions and presentations on emerging trends, technology and workflows. See our interview with Nelson on page 12. The LA-based PRODUCTION MUSIC ASSOCIATION (www. pmamusic.com), which is comprised of over 360 member companies, has introduced a Standardized Metadata Format for use by production music li- braries. The guidelines are designed to benefit production music libraries and help publishers and composers get paid more accurately and in a more timely manner. The format outlines the proper procedure for storing regis- tration and non-creative information. For the third year, MANTRA DESIGN (www.mantradesign.tv) created im- ager y that appeared on background screens during performances at the Country Music Awards. The studio relied on Adobe After Effects and vari- ous 3D applications to execute the project, completing the job in just three weeks. Performances included songs by Taylor Swift, the Zac Brown Band, Lady Antebellum,Tim McGraw and Miranda Lambert. Arri's ARRIFLEX D-21 digital camera is seeing a lot of work on television shows. In addition to Showtime's Nurse Jackie (reported on in Post's Octo- ber issue), the D-21 is also being used to shoot ABC's V , NBC's Community, Fox's Lie To Me, HBO's Bored To Death and CW's Supernatural. Those who've used the D-21 comment on its ability to render "film-like" images. Paris-based THOMSON (www.thomson.net ) has promoted Ahmad Ouri to CMO, responsible for overall marketing, communications and branding. He will be based out of the Technicolor'sHollywood office. Ouri joined Technicolor in '02 and has held multiple senior roles, including president of Technicolor Digital Cinema, CTO/president of the Technicolor Content Services business unit, and president of Technicolor's strategy, technology and marketing. An investor group has announced plans to purchase a former manufac- turing plant in Stratford, CT, with the goal of turning it into a motion pic- ture and television production studio.The 292,000-square-foot facility is located on approximately 18 acres of land and will be called DOGSTAR (www. dogstardmg.com). It will feature 12 soundstages, 22,000 square feet of office space, 100,000 square feet for support services, and an ed- ucational component. CSS Studios' TODD-AO (www.toddao.com) has extended the lease for the Todd-AO West facility, located within the Lantana complex at 3000 Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica. Todd-AO West consists of five mixing stages, one ADR stage, one Foley stage and a number of editorial rooms. London-based post houses UNIT (www.unit.tv) and CONTENT (www.contentpost.co.uk) have formed a creative par tnership that will give clients access to complementary services. The par tnership comes as Content relocates its offices to opposite Unit on Carlisle Street in London. There, Content is opening the "Content Lab" with individual workstations for clients.The studio will take advantage of Unit's fully-tapeless facilities. S TUDIO CITY, CA — David Fincher, the director of The Curious Case of Benjamin But- ton, Zodiac and Fight Club, is using a new data management system for his latest project The Social Network, which tells the story behind the development of the social media platform Facebook. Fincher's technical team, headed by Joe Wolcott, is using Media Distribu- tors' Archive Station R-2, to provide safe and simple archive of the produc- tion's most critical media, creating a tapeless workflow that is saving time and money, while providing safe LTO-4 backup of Red camera media files. Archive Station is designed as a media archive and asset management system for tapeless productions. This Mac-based system provides secure LTO-4 back-up, media conversions and rapid access to archived and disk-based video content. Wolcott was tasked with creating a workflow that allowed Fincher to shoot on multiple Red One cameras, archive the media quickly and safely to dupli- cate LTO-4 tapes, and process the files in realtime to Apple's ProRes for Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter, David Fincher's long-time editors. Since production took place in Boston, Baltimore and LA, the solution also needed to be portable, powerful and stable. "Red was great — they upgraded our camera sensors, built custom cam- eras and collaborated with us to pro- vide David with the ability to over- crank to 36fps at 4K, on a ver y shor t schedule," says Wolcott. "We then quickly needed a new data manage- ment system optimized for Red, but able to incorporate the best features we designed into the Zodiac and Button ViperCam workflows. Media Distribu- tors was equally helpful and collabora- tive. The Archive Station is a great product, and their engineering team customized it to suit us perfectly, includ- ing a 'stripped down' single editor ver- sion for Boston locations and a full- blown four-station XSAN-based sys- tem for the balance of production and post in Los Angeles." Wolcott's team shipped the rented Archive Station and a Final Cut Pro sys- tem from Media Distributors' LA of- fices to a hotel in Boston, where Media Distributors' chief engineer, Tony Cahill, worked with assistant editor Tyler Nel- son to ensure the operation went smoothly and to provide insight into the depths of Constellation, the asset and storage management software at the heart of Archive Station. "We engineered the location work- flow so that everything in Boston could be completed by a single editor. Even with four cameras rolling,Tyler was able to keep up with production and have everything archived to duplicate LTO-4s, processed to ProRes for editorial, and processed to h.264 and uploaded to PIX System for dailies, well within a 24- hour period," says Cahill. "Tyler was able to do the ingest, cloning, processing, pic- ture QC and all the offline editorial. He even did split-screen with camera mo- tion control all by himself.The typical day involved Red CF cards coming into the workflow around midday and, within 12- 14 hours, editorial drives were shipped to LA and dailies were posted to PIX". The initial shoot in Boston lasted two weeks before moving to Baltimore for a few days and then returning to LA for the final 14 weeks of shooting. The set-up at Fincher's No. 13 offices incor- porates 64TB of Active Storage's XRAID storage into a powerful XSAN solution with Archive Stations handling ingest and RedRocket cards handling file conversion for editorial. Fincher's location team primarily shot with two units, using two Red cameras each. The Archive Station system processed between 50 to 80 Red CF cards every day without losing a frame. "Collaboration between filmmakers and digital workflow providers is essen- tial, and Red is more efficient, commu- nicative and expedient than any com- pany we have worked with," says Cean Chaffin, producer of The Social Network. Fincher's The Social Network employs datacentric workflow