Wednesday 7th May
Thomson
gives Dailies a Cutting Edge on Marvel Wolverine movie
Leading Australian post house Cutting Edge is delivering high quality dailies
on the 20th Century Fox feature Wolverine to both sides of the Pacific,
thanks to the Thomson Grass Valley Bones Dailies workflow tools from Thomson.
Although the film is being shot in Australia studio executives in Los Angeles
are kept up to date via Bones Dailies software.
Designed from the ground up for managing rushes on a movie project, Bones
Dailies controls the Spirit DataCine for film scanning at up to 4k resolution.
In HD or 2k the Spirit under Bones Dailies control can ingest material at
up to 25% faster than real time. It synchronizes the picture with sound
and, in conjunction with other Bones components, it allows a color correction
pass with the metadata captured using the ASC color decision list (CDL)
format to form the basis of the final grade later in the post cycle. Bones
Dailies is able to output in standard definition or HD up to HDCAM SR 10
bit 4:4:4 quality.
In January 2008, Cutting Edge installed two Bones Dailies systems as part
of a major upgrade of their post production facilities in Sydney and Brisbane.
Only days after installation, Bones Dailies was put into action on the feature
film Wolverine for 20th Century Fox. “Fox Post was keen to see how
Bones Dailies could save time in editorial and improve the quality of the
material viewed by both the production and the executives at Fox in LA”
said John Lee, president and founder of Cutting Edge.
“At the end of a session, fully logged and synchronized dailies are
ready to be played out from Bones within 10 minutes of the final lab roll
being captured, with Bones performing logging and sound syncing on one roll
at the same time as the colorist is grading the next,” said Lee. “This
is a huge savings in time and effort on the part of the editorial team,
who are given DNxHD media and full metadata immediately after our first
Bones playout pass. With Bones Dailies we have been able to create a set
of deliverables that have never been possible before due to time or technical
restrictions with the equipment.”
Bones Dailies divides the workflow of making dailies into five logical processes:
audio ingest and logging, image ingest and logging, sound synchronization,
color grading, and finally playout for multiple deliverables. On Wolverine
Cutting Edge was asked to make two different versions of each day’s
dailies: a “print all” version for editorial and production, and
a “circle takes only” version for the studio executives in LA.
Without Bones Dailies, creating the second version would have meant loading
the print all version into a nonlinear editor, cutting the select takes
and conforming the edit back out to tape. With Bones Dailies this time-consuming
stage, which would have needed more equipment and reduced the image quality
of the deliverable, has been eliminated.
“Thanks to Bones Dailies, Cutting Edge was able to create a first generation
HDCAM SR circle takes only tape to send to the studio with synchronized
audio, specific burn-ins, masking and watermarks” said Aaron Downing,
Post Executive for Fox.
“Movie makers should be allowed to concentrate on their creativity,
and their technology should support they way they want to work not dictate
workflows,” said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Thomson’s
Broadcast & Professional Solutions within the Systems division. “It
is very clear from the example of Cutting Edge’s work on Wolverine
that Bones Dailies is a huge boost to productivity.
Bones Dailies can operate as a single seat system on locally attached storage
or as a multiple seat system on a shared access SAN. It uses specific algorithms
developed inside Thomson’s Corporate Research Division for automatic
detection processing of audio slate closures during ingest of each Lab Roll.
Bones Dailies can also perform the color correction. It uses non-destructive
color correction techniques - GPU powered - according to the ASC’s
CDL grading schema, or as an alternative way of working you can use an external
color correction device to ‘bake in’ a grade during image ingest.
New enhancements to Bones Dailies launched at NAB2008 include scaling between
2k and 4k resolution files, and burn-in displays of timecode, keycode and
other metadata. Thanks to a co-operative development between Thomson and
Digital Rapids, Bones Dailies can now be used to deliver dailies at any
resolution over IP circuits to anywhere in the world.
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Trilithic’s
EASyIP EAS network receiver
Trilithic, a leading provider of Government-mandated Emergency Alert Systems,
has announced a new product to revolutionise the receipt and delivery of
EAS Messages in Video Delivery Networks.
The new EASyIP EAS Network Receiver extends the area of message reception
for a Cable TV or IPTV network, while improving the reliability of the message
delivery. The EASyIP EAS Network Receiver will log and cue the EAS message
for the EAS Encoder/Decoder. Once the Encoder/Decoder is ready for the message
it is handled and distributed to consumers. There are no more lost messages.
In addition, The EASyPLUS or EASyIP Encoder/Decoder can handle duplicate
messages, providing a level of redundancy that has not been available before.
With better message reception, audio message storage and cueing, and EAS
message redundancy, the EASyIP EAS Network Receiver has changed the way
EAS networks are designed and operated.
The new EASyIP EAS Network Receiver will be available for demonstration
at the SCTE Cable Tec Expo at the Trilithic Booth.
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