Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/9707
P2 files, but it goes through a transcode process to QuickTime. It takes time to get all this material into the machine, often longer than a realtime process — before file formats you would digitize from tapes, which was a near realtime process.” In terms of Red productions, Ashley says this workflow has been one of the biggest challenges for most people.“Final Cut han- dles Red files in a certain way and Avid han- dles them in a certain way, and they both have their pros and cons.” Even with available applications that have sped up Red transcoding, Ashley says it’s still a long-winded process to transfer hours and hours of footage, which leads to another issue — too much footage.“The film disci- pline has been lost to a certain extent,” he reports.“Turn the camera off every once in a while because it bites you in the ass in the backend. It’s going to take twice as long to transcode and log everything and doesn’t necessarily add to the quality of the content.” This all makes more work for the post house.“We are putting in extra time but not getting paid for it,” explains Ashley. “People think it’s a cheaper format, but most of the consequences of that is ending up in post house’s lap.” Another way datacentric workflows have expanded the role of the post house has been in relation to dailies. In the past, on commercials, the production company would be responsible for providing the edit house with dailies.“With file-based formats they now hand the files to us and we be- come the lab,” says Ashley. “Normally it would be a day or to two to turn around a negative into a daily, now it’s a day or two to turn around the files into a format that Avid or Final Cut could handle. It’s some- thing that needs to be addressed as far as line items, because normally a production company would be including that in their bid and now we need to include it in ours, though AICE has worked hard to get line items like this into bids for commercial pro- duction.There is a degree of client educa- tion that needs to happen also. Company X’s work includes projects shot on all kinds of digital formats.A recent music video directed by Danny Clinch — Ryan continued on page 51 Digital Film Central (www.digitalfilmcentral.com) in Vancouver had significant challenges while incorporating archival footage for the film Facing Ali, a documentary about boxer Mohammed Ali. James Tocher, CTO of DFC and co-designer of the Texture module of Cin- nafilm’s Dark Energy (also sold as Arri Relativity), used the software on the archival elements of Alifor its various frame-rate conver- sions, de-noising, dust-busting and texture requirements. “All the archival footage for Aliwas low-format film sources, severely de- graded by videotape copying over 30 years,” says Tocher.“We had to deal with the film grain, mismatched frame rates, analog and dig- ital noise and drop outs — and it all had to be up-rezzed to HD.” Cinnafilm’s Dark Energy product also has the ability to ingest, process and output both SDI and uncompressed files, and uses pop- ular compression schemes in broadcast or DI. The interface provides the end-user the ability to combine sophisticated motion analysis tools in an environment free of process order restrictions. www.postmagazine.com April 2010 • Post 43 DIGIT AL