Digital technology has changed the face of the film and television industry in so many ways and it all boils down to data. The speed with which heaps of electronic image files (we’re talking dozens of terabytes) are now transmitted and accessed—via proprietary networks, the Internet, or even satellites—around the globe, makes the process of shipping film cans look like a Kinetoscope from a bygone era. And editors, directors, and DPs who enter an all-data post house can now work on the same scene, at the same time, for completely different purposes. No doubt the idea of a “filmless workflow” will make traditionalists wince, but it’s a process that has caught on at an eye-popping pace. ICG went behind the scenes with three different data workflow firms that are leading the charge in each of their respective niches. If terms like “meta-data,” “network latency,” or “non-blocking 4 Gigabit switches” don’t quite register yet, you’re not alone: it’s only a matter of time before the language of all-data workflow begins to sink in.

SOHONET
www.sohonet.co.uk
To say Sohonet plays in the same space as the world’s biggest telecommunication providers is to miss the point, really. Yes, this London-based company has built their own proprietary fiber optic networks in different cities around the globe. Yes, the company was formed 12 years ago by a group of post-production houses looking to move data around their Soho area more efficiently than any of the local telecos. Yes, Sohonet actually was owned by a teleco, before being bought out five years ago by industry pros to expand the firm’s global reach in the entertainment industry. But having set-up networks in key production cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Sydney that run 10 Gigabit Ethernet and MPLS technology, Sohonet blows any ISP out of the water when it comes to transmitting high volumes of uncompressed data at the most secure level.

“The work we did for the Harry Potter films began with just moving high-res dailies around the London locations, and evolved into transmitting visual effects back to Burbank for studio review,” explains Sohonet CEO and President Dave Scammell. “For the most recent Potter film, we put together an all-data work flow based around the DI. Everything was shot on film and scanned, and then moved around our secure network as data. The only time it ever went back to tape or film media was for release, which saved a lot of time and money. Loading a terabyte of data can take hours.” For Warner Bros. recent Speed Racer, shot on the Sony F23, Sohonet created an on-set network that facilitated timed editorial rough cuts the same day material was shot. It also included digital look-up tables for the DP to check footage on the set. Because Sohonet’s networks are not Internet-based, the company is able to preserve the highest level of security, speed and bandwidth available; for the Speed Racer production, they moved upwards of 45 Terabytes of data around the globe. The demand for data workflow competency is so high; the company founded an offshoot firm, Sohonet Solutions, catering to production service. Its work on the soon-to-be-released James Bond: Quantum of Solace involved designing systems and processes to handle 60 Terabytes of uncompressed 4K and HD data, which had been captured on an effects sequence utilizing 8 DALSA Origin 4K cameras and 7 HD cameras.

Sohonet Solutions’ senior partner, Jon Ferguy, said that problem solving for digital production workflows was already a major part of the firm’s business, and with the maturing of digital content creation, in particular digital cinematography, the parent arm “wanted to distinguish itself from Sohonet’s primary business model as a connectivity provider.” In fact, Dave Scammell says the main challenge Sohonet continues to face is one of perception. “People sometimes think we’re an ISP,” he laments. “But we’re a company that specializes in all areas of data workflow—storage, security, transmission, logistics—and each job is customized to the client’s needs.” Scammell, who was backing D-Cinema initiatives in the U.K. a decade ago, says that one day he can envision Sohonet becoming the direct network link between the DI lab and the cinema house. He says the sooner his team meets with the cinematographer on a job, the better. “Speed Racer had us in early on, consulting on the various tests they did with different cameras to help determine their workflow,” concludes Scammell. “On at least one of the Harry Potter films, we created a remote DI so the cinematographer could be correcting as he went along. We’re able to speak the same language as the post-production, visual effects, cinematography, and studio executives, because our experience is film and TV, not public utility or telecommunications.”

PLASTERCITY DIGITAL POST
www.plastercitypost.com
“Not only are we filmless, but we’re also tapeless,” announces Michael Cioni, Director of Operations for PlasterCITY Digital Post [www.plastercitypost.com]. Cioni is showing me around his five-year old Hollywood facility that caters to films, commercials and, more recently, network television shows, working in Final Cut Pro, and, by extension, native QuickTime files easily shared across PlasterCITY’s internal 200 terabyte storage area network (SAN). “Not only are we tapeless for the on-line and DI, which is common, but also for the off-line on the same SAN network. Most facilities separate their SANs so that DI and offline are not shared between two departments,” Cioni continues. “We like to say that post-supervisors only need to have one parking space to finish their movies, because we can do everything, including 5.1 surround audio mixes in-house.” That’s no idle boast. PlasterCITY currently has seventeen 2K edit systems (that’s including the DI room), able to draw from their 4 Gigabit fiber network, the heart of which are multiple SANs aggregated across separate workflows. “Five years ago people said we were crazy to build a datacentric post house geared around Final Cut Pro,” Cioni smiles. “But this whole facility cost less than two telecine bays, and today, ninety percent of the features in our DI suite comes from a Final Cut Pro off-line.”

PlasterCITY’s DI suite, manned by resident colorist/digital genius, Ian Vertovec, aka “Bernardo,” is based around a 4K Quantel Pablo with material that is all data conformed. Color correction can be done on multiple channels, with composites of different effects coming in via multiple layers. The Pablo draws from the in-house network and plays back from a RAID internal storage system. Even formats that are innately compressed are transcoded to an uncompressed codec so the workflow into and out of the Pablo is of the highest resolution. Vertovec was working on Garfield’s Fun Fest, when we dropped in. “This is all 16-bit uncompressed TIFF files, so we’re getting extremely dynamic color correction,” he observed. “The 35mm film-out will definitely enjoy the 16-bit file structure.” “But,” Cioni is quick to add, “[the 35mm release print] will be grainy, and dirty and shaky, and the colors won’t match. We’re continually disappointed by film’s poor projection results as compared to DLP.”

Cioni pulls up a commercial shot in Red Cinema on one of PlasterCITY’s many edit bays. The new high-speed 4K format, which captures raw data with a football-sized camera and is easily upgraded via website firmware, now accounts for 60 percent of the company’s workflow. “We feel that the DIT [digital imaging technician] has taken control away from the cinematographer, and this is where the Red, and a datacentric workflow, gives it back,” Cioni insists. “When everyone shot in 35mm, there was no digital tent with HD monitors and people crowding around with an opinion about what the DP was trying to do. Now we have GDP and Luther boxes that require a DIT to purify the signal before the DP ever sees it. The footage goes to a dailies color timer, and then to an off-line for several months, before reaching the DI, where the cinematographer has a few days to wrangle things back to what he intended!” Cioni points out that the raw data capture of the Red cannot be seen until the DP is sitting in the DI suite with the colorist, where he’s seeing images with 10 stops of latitude and 12 bits of color that rival 35mm. “The DP sets the look on the set with Red Cinema, but he’s never locked into it,” notes Cioni. “The capture is all meta-data, and that gives the DP the control to finalize the look at the end of the process with the color timer, just like 35mm. We see an all-data workflow as the tip of a Copernicus revolution; DPs who understand the potential of timing raw data in a one-stop facility like ours have found it very exciting.”

NICE SPOTS
www.nicespots.com
If Sohonet is the Ferrari of data workflow, providing mega-bandwidth networking for the likes of HBO and Warner Bros, and Plaster City Digital Post is a cutting-edge hybrid, servicing independents and tech-savvy cinematographers, then Nice Spots may well be the data world’s Honda Civic: not as many bells and whistles but affordable, and easy to drive. John DiMaggio is the firm’s managing director, and he says Nice Spots evolved from its parent company, New York-based post-house Nice Shoes, as a way to resolve data problems encountered by their global clients. “We created a web-based software that would not lock people into any one file format or application,” DiMaggio explains from his Manhattan office. “Anybody with digital media, anywhere in the world, can upload to our website. We will then transcode it to a QuickTime file that’s compatible with iTunes and the iPod, as well as Windows Media and Flash, which covers both our PC and Mac clients, and people wanting to build a web reel in Flash.”

Workflows for Nice Spots include distribution of final materials and marrying distant location shoots with their post-production partners. “We have clients finishing a version of a commercial in the U.S.,” DiMaggio continues, “and uploading it to Nice Spots as an uncompressed QuickTime file, with separate audio tracks and separate graphic files. Broadcasters worldwide, in places like Australia, Mexico or China, then download that spot. We recently had a commercial that was shooting in Argentina, and the editing was in New York. The turn-around time needed to be very fast, so they encoded their material in Argentina as QuickTime files, uploaded to Nice Spots, and the editors could download and work right away.”

DiMaggio laughs when clients call his firm, the “You Tube” of the digital post industry. But he says he envisioned a web-based company years before the famous website came on-line. He says the best pricing model has been pay-as-you-go; clients get billed only for uploading, with costs determined by the size of the file. This means a single editor or commercial DP can have a web presence for an unlimited period for as little as thirty dollars. The model also scales up to large firms, who can charge-back uploading costs to the corporate client while they’re in production. Recent jobs for Nice Spots included the international re-branding for Avon, where they uploaded NTSC and PAL elements of finished spots and organized material by country, and writing the entry system for this year’s AICP (Association of Independent Commercial Producers) show. Tools built into Nice Spots allowed judges to mark-up entries when they could not decipher CGI from live action. “We have a collaborative tool called Real Chat, where a moderator clicks on a video clip, and everyone logged on to Nice Spots sees it at the same time,” concludes DiMaggio. “A DP can talk about exposure with the colorist; an editor can talk about re-sizing the frame with a director. They have drawing tools and instant messaging at their fingertips and it’s all in real time.”