Hollywood’s Digital Future
The most common use of streaming and downloads among the Hollywood and Burbank studios — and the one that offers the most obvious efficiencies — is in "digital dailies." Dailies — film footage shot the previous day and processed overnight — are screened each morning by the director and other key production personnel. Dailies are a crucial part of the process for the simple reason that once a set is dismantled, and a crew of 100 or more has moved to another location, it’s too late (read, too expensive) to make adjustments in the script, the set, or an actor’s performance. Dailies let the key players know exactly what they have in the can, as soon as possible. Timeliness is where digital delivery steps in.
Digital dailies are particularly valuable on international productions, when film dailies might otherwise spend days in transit and customs. BeastMaster, a syndicated action-adventure series, makes particularly fruitful use of the technology. The series is shot in Australia, edited in Canada, and supervised out of Los Angeles. Dailies are encoded in Australia and forwarded overnight via Telestream ClipMail to Alliance Atlantis and Tribune Entertainment offices in Los Angeles, and the post-production facility in Toronto. Depending on Internet traffic, it typically takes two to four hours to send an hour of dailies.
"There are logistical problems in getting tape from the backwoods of Australia to Canada, with air freight and two sets of customs, in less than three days," says EDnet’s vice president of engineering, Tom Scott, who helped create BeastMaster digital daily system. "The tape will eventually be coming, but [digital dailies] give the editors and producers an extra day or two to look at the material and make sure they have the coverage they need."
Digital dailies can offer particular benefits to episodic television series working under tight schedules. Historically, editors have had to spend hours each morning digitizing the previous day’s dailies for ingestion into Avids or other nonlinear editing systems. Delivery of pre-digitized Avid files via Media.net allows editors on the CBS drama, Family Law, to spend those hours on more creative editorial work. Nonlinear dailies also allow users to jump to specific locations without having to fast-forward or rewind through hours of videotape. In addition, the Media.net application allows executives to send the editors and others frame-specific comments attached to the media.
The Right Effect
When dailies must be seen in context to know whether or not they will work with the production as a whole, they are sent immediately to editors or visual effects artists who assemble sequences or visual effects shots for the director’s approval.
"Evolution," the recently released Dreamworks SKG feature, used WAM!NET’s satellite/production truck to transfer visual effects clips between Tippet Studio in Berkeley, Calif. and remote production locations in Arizona. "[Visual effects supervisor] Phil Tippet’s group was able to WAM!NET two or three times a day," says "Evolution’s" visual effects producer Nancy St. John. "Then Phil would go into the truck, view the [sequences], call his buddies back home, and say, ‘Yes, no, change this or change that.’ This way, Phil’s team had the rest of the day to make changes." She adds, "When you’ve got 160 people sitting in Berkeley, the last thing you want to do is wait for FedEx."
St. John also worked with WAM!NET on Ridley Scott’s "Gladiator." During post-production, "Gladiator’s" Santa Monica-based editorial team used WAM!NET to link up with Mill Film, the London-based visual effects facility that was responsible for more than 100 of "Gladiator’s" visual effects shots. At the end of each workday, Mill Film would forward Avid video files via WAM!NET to Santa Monica. After reviewing the forwarded clips (that same day, eight hours earlier), the editorial team would send detailed notes on the clips back to Mill Film. "You’ve got a crew of 100 people over in London sleeping while you’re sending all the notes back," says St. John. "They get up the next morning and they’re functioning fully."
Similarly, for Warner Brothers’ "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone," scheduled for release this November, visual-effects supervisor Rob Legato uses NeTune’s broadband delivery service to forward digital media files overnight between the Sony ImageWorks visual effects facility in Culver City, Calif. and Legato’s London flat. "It’s like two shifts working day and night," says Legato. "Once you use the NeTune system, you really can’t go back to doing anything else."