Saturday 24 May 2008

Thomson gives Dailies a Cutting Edge on 'Wolverine' movie

From:

From a press release:
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 (Euronext Paris: 18453; NYSE: TMS). 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.

For more information, follow the link.

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