HPA 2012

THE RED ZONE PLAYS

  By: Brandon Bussinger, Director of Technology

• Le timecode est mort, vive le timecode!

• The next generation of the Next Generation Workflow from WB.

• Lasers not just for Rush shows anymore

• Disks and DOTS and LTFS.. Oh My

• We did our DI in 72K

• Distributed Computing 2: Attack of The Blob!

Last week, Hollywood's technology community gathered for the annual HPA Tech Retreat in Palm Springs California.  I'm sure visions of Bacchanalian excess are coming to mind, but a more accurate description would be hour-long presentations on enhanced color spaces for UHDTV (Ultra High Definition Television).  Similar though...

The retreat kicked off on Monday with a seminar by Charles Poynton, a well respected color scientist who - like me - is amazed at the lack of a well defined standard for the display of REC 709 encoded video.  I'm sure someone will jump down my throat for that, (and yes I am familiar with ITU BT.1886), but in the field I still see things all over the place.

But I digress...  

I was unable to attend on Monday, but joined the festivities on Tuesday morning for a series of presentations on what Leon Silverman of Disney loves to call "Snowflake Workflows."  Why snowflakes?  Because no two are the same.  The presentations began with what can only be described as a manifesto for the future of post from the always outspoken Michael Cioni, which included a call for, among other things, the replacement of time-of-day timecode with a per frame unique identifier. Considering that timecode is a half century old and was really designed to synchronize missile launches, he is completely right in my opinion, but we are unlikely to see that happen any time soon (I'm happy to be wrong about this).  

Following Cioni's "call to arms," and a presentation on the post workflow for Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, it was my turn to hit the panel stage.

Sean Cooney, Vice President of Advanced Production Technology at Warner Brothers was back at it again this year trying to prove the impossible is possible with a follow up to his Next Generation Workflow project from 2010/11, and we at SIXTEEN19 had been brought along for the ride.  Last year Sean set out to evaluate available on set workflow tools and examine their real world application.

What did he find out, you ask?  

He found that, while amazing technologies have arrived on the market, the "glue" to stick them together is lacking.  Enter, NGP 2012.  Sean once again brought together a disparate group of product developers, users and vendors to examine ways to collect, share, and transport the ever increasing flow of metadata generated by a feature film or television production.  Either Sean is a glutton for punishment, or next year he will take on US foreign policy in the Middle East and save the world. Always up for a challenge, we joined in to help out however we could.  

While the project is ongoing, Sean Cooney, myself, Anthony Pettine of ScriptE Systems, Steve Cronan of 5th Kind, Kirsten Thayer of Final Draft, David Jaffe of Salesforce, David Stump of the ASC, and Bernie Laramie of MOS Sync, Inc., took the stage to discuss "The Metadata Problem."

While the problem has in no way been fully solved, Sean’s panel all agreed on the importance of creating a powerful, non-proprietary database environment for the interchange of metadata from any number of tools available, or yet to be developed, for the filmmaking community.  Taking cues from the IT industry and others, the group is looking at how an ecosystem consisting of a database platform and job specific "apps" can finally level that pile of NCR camera reports, truly integrate camera, script, editorial, and VFX, and ultimately free filmmakers to spend more time thinking about the emotions in a scene and less time thinking about paperwork, all while making the studio accounting department happy.  

Easy, right?  

Leave it to Sean to go after the easy problems.  What have we found so far?

Happily, there is a surprising amount of agreement and enthusiasm from people throughout our industry, and it is more or less agreed that one system WILL NOT rule them all.  It will take a bottom up development strategy that focuses on the needs of individual craftspeople, leaving integration to the database, and it will be a combination of standards, open-source projects, and commercial products that will ultimately fill the gaps we have today.  This is why we like Sean- he keeps us as a company, as well as the industry as a whole, looking to the future.

The following days brought us such highlights as a presentation on the future of archiving technology from LTFS to DOTS; a discussion of laser illumination for digital cinema projectors (unfortunately, Laser Floyd is not coming to a cinema near you, but better color is); more talk about 4K than you can shake a pixel at; and of course ACES.  Also a number of product developers were on hand to present the latest and greatest in digital filmmaking technology (that is until NAB when we get the good stuff).  I suspect a number of these technologies will become a big part of all our lives.

Laser illumination presents the possibility of brighter 3D, expanded color, lower power consumption, higher consistency longer life, and smaller form factors for digital cinema projectors.  As we see more and more aspects of post production go on the road, technologies like this will make our lives much easier.  

On the archive technology front we are seeing improved stability and a wider adoption of LTFS for LTO data archives, and a number of optical storage solutions- including the much anticipated DOTS system which promises highly stable long term archiving for digital data.  Archiving technology alone could occupy us for far longer than we have in this recap, but suffice it to say, it's getting better little by little.  

Lastly, with the massive proliferation of 4K+ capable cameras - including the RED Epic, Arri Alexa, and Sony F65 (we can get into an argument about Bayer patterns, bit depth, compression and over sampling, but let's just call these all 4K cameras) - we saw a number of discussions about the advantages of higher resolutions and the need for wider adoption of 4K post workflows.  As storage gets faster, camera sensors get better, and displays get more pixels, the argument for 4K post get's more and more valid.  In fact, we are already seeing 4K projectors from JVC and Sony targeted at a home theatre audience.  You thought SD commercials looked bad in HD, wait till we blow up shampoo commercials to 4K...  

Just as 4K is taking over our minds and hard drives, so is the promise of better colorspaces.  Enter ACES, the Academy's effort to provide a workflow for the unified handling of the multitude of cameras and colorspaces available today.  It was a hot topic last year, and as we have discussed in earlier posts, is still in the works, but is unlikely to go away...and that's a very good thing.

Of course no technology conference would be complete without extensive use of the word "cloud," which - as was pointed out by George Joblove from the Academy - is defined as:

"Anything that obscures or darkens something, or causes gloom, trouble, suspicion, 

disgrace, etc."

From this I decided to rebrand "the cloud" as "The Blob" which is "a fluid, amorphous, and ever expanding entity that consumes and frightens people."  Pretty apt description I think.  Plus, wouldn't it be more fun to say "I work in The Blob?"  We'll see if it catches on.

The importance of cloud architectures is evident in projects such as Sean Cooney's NGP, but it is seemingly creeping into every discussion from archiving to remote color grading to the dream of camera-to-blob (I'm trademarking that) capture.  We still have a number of connectivity problems to solve, but it is already happening on your phone so why is it so far fetched to see it happening on set?  The possibilities are seemingly endless but the question remains: will it give us seamless creation, collaboration, and communication? Or, will it drag us into a Tower of Babel like descent into chaos?

It's an exciting time in our world, and with the speed at which we are seeing new developments I'm sure everything discussed here will be irrelevant by next week.  Luckily events like this give us all a chance to sit down, take a deep breath and discuss where we are, and where we are headed. The intimate nature of HPA is a great antidote to the massive booths and overwhelming crowds of NAB. I look forward to future retreats, as it is a unique opportunity to hear what our colleagues have been up to since last year and a sneak peek at what will be keeping me up at night in the year to come.

One of Showtime Sports and CBS Sports’ most highly rated original feature length docu-dramas, A Game Of Honor provided an extraordinary perspective on preparations for the 2011 Army-Navy football game. Digital production teams chronicled U.S. Military Academy/West Point cadets and U.S. Naval Academy/Annapolis midshipmen throughout their intense military, educational and sports training as they readied themselves to serve their country and compete in this sports event.

With shooting beginning in May and the edit gearing up in September, the team had three months to edit and deliver the incredible events leading up to the widely anticipated 2011 Army / Navy game. With this tight schedule, including just 11 days between the Army/Navy game and the show’s airdate, Director/ Producer Peter Radovich, Jr. and Producer Steve Karasik enlisted frequent collaborator and Emmy-winning Sixteen19 creative editor Anthony Cortese for the cut.

“Last April, I had an epiphany about doing a documentary on training for the 2011 Army-Navy game,” Radovich says. “When Steve Karasik and I pitched it to CBS/Showtime execs, we got an immediate green light. When we kicked off production in May I was a little concerned about pulling it together in just six months. However, Anthony and I had collaborated on a number of short-form projects at Sixteen19, and I had great confidence in his skills. I knew we could make this happen.”

“A Game Of Honor, was one of the most complex and demanding assignments of my career,” Cortese says. “On most days, we had two cameras shooting on location morning thru night; on the field, in classrooms, dorms, gyms, all over both academies, but that ratcheted up to eight Canon 5D and Red Epic(r) kits for the main event, The 112th Army Navy Game. They accrued nearly 500 hours of footage, which I cut on a daily basis on Avid Version 5 as it arrived in our edit suite. This project was a full-scale marathon.” Associate editors Quenna Gregorio and Chris Mole worked alongside Cortese to manage multiple story lines.

To keep track of the voluminous material, the Sixteen19 technical team worked with the project’s field producers to develop a dailies workflow that was both fast and efficient. With over 100 shoot days, distinct tape names, scene and serial numbers were critical for each clip. This system helped to transcend the timecode limitations of the 5D at the time, issues with sync sound and the fact that crews were often simply moving too quickly to slate.

“A tapeless workflow project of this scope required an extraordinary support crew,” Cortese says. Sixteen19′s technical team collaborated closely with Cortese and a number of consulting experts to insure accurate conversion of multiple archival formats to 24p. After picture lock, Sixteen19 Senior Colorist Brian Boyd worked around the clock to make the footage come to life. Boyd remarked, “Balancing the multiple formats and shoot settings with such a tight deadline was challenging, but the timely and patriotic subject matter and the incredibly talented crew made for a rewarding experience.”

In addition to editing the two-hour CBS Sports docu-drama, which premiered Dec. 21st on Showtime, Cortese also edited a two-hour CBS TV cut. The network show hewed closely to the original, but excised the unexpurgated language of the cable version along with some particularly rough action scenes. He also edited seven of the ten ‘webisodes’ created to promote the show online. Ranging in length from three to eight minutes, they provided fans with additional details and insights not included in the full-length program.

“The ‘webisodes’ were an entirely different mindset,” Cortese points out. “They began airing in mid-October, and they continue to maintain a strong presence online today. We received reports that indicate they not only helped to attract a terrific audience to the Showtime and CBS presentations, but they’ve also attracted a rapt audience in their own right. We’ve heard stories about ardent online viewers who watch them repeatedly,literally studying them over and over. It’s gratifying to learn that your work is getting that level of serious attention.”

“We were cutting new footage up to a couple of weeks before airtime, we’re talking late nights and weekends here,” Rodovich concludes. “New story lines kept us constantly revising to make GOH as exciting and timely as possible. We screened the show for West Point and Annapolis brass shortly before airtime. Their positive reactions confirmed our instinct about having created something very special. We hope to have the DVD out soon, which will stand as a lasting record of this amazing adventure.”

Click here to download:

aces.pdf (240 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

aces.pdf (240 KB)

This diagram shows a hypothetical ACES workflow for a digital acquisition project. Mind you, this is not a realistic workflow but it gives an illustration of how the in's and out's are supposed to work without getting into any specific applications or display technology. Going forward we'll analyze the individual components of this diagram which will inherently answer the questions we all have about using ACES. The next post will dig into the current state of grading with ACES.