Pirates takes advantage of D-VHS, DI - Special Report: Technology

Post, July, 2003 by Daniel Restuccio

"No one has done eleven-and-a-half weeks of post with a digital intermediate and 700 visual effects shots, ever!" declares Pat Sandston confidently. What he really means is until now. Sandston is the enthusiastically animated associate producer in charge of post production for Jerry Bruckheimer's production company JBFilms (www.jbfilms.com). His two high-profile summer movies, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of die Black Pearl and Bad Boys II, are forging a new post pipeline both out of necessity and the desire to get closer sooner to the finished picture. By taking full advantage of both JVC's D-VHS format and digital intermediate technology, Sandston and JBFilms are making better pictures faster and cheaper.

Sandston, who has been running post for Jerry Bruckheimer since 1995's Crimson Tide, is a veteran of 18 feature films. He reports that the post on Pirates is the tightest he's ever done. "We did [1998's] Armageddon in 16 weeks, We had 585 visual effects. We worked around the clock. That was a legendary post." But Pirates, which stars Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush, had 115 more visual effects to produce and a month less time.

Sandston made a key decision to bypass film or even SD dailies and instead transfer all film negative to high definition D-VHS dailies using JVC's password-protected Pro-HD system.

THE TECHNOLOGY

"The Pro-HD D-VHS system" says Larry Librach, JVC's assistant VP of business development for broadcast and entertainment," is intended to be a mass market consumer technology that we have adapted to have a broad range of professional applications."

MGM, Warner Bros. and Universal are in the process of assessing and integrating the D-VHS systems into their post production and screening pipeline, and post facilities FotoKem, Crest National and LaserPacific are already providing Pro-HD D-VHS services to their clients. Sandston was introduced to the technology through David Leener, a colleague at JBFilms, and immediately jumped on it for post.

So let's get the big questions out of the way. How is it that a $950 retooled VHS deck can display four hours of HD 1080i? Part of the answer is in the word "display."

"The expensive HD cameras are a frame-bound DV architecture," says Librach. "The D-VHS machine however uses a bit-stream technology to record and play back an MPEG-2 encoded file at 25Mb per second."

Okay but Librach says "record." So why can't this format be used for production instead of the $64,000 plus HDCAM?

"Because to encode MPEG-2 you need a $40,000 MPEG-2 encoder," says Librach. "This format does not have timecode; it does not have a 4:2:2 interface. This is a technology that is affordable for display, not production." (But that's just for now. Earlier this year, JVC released a Pro-HD MPEG-2 camcorder, the JY-HD 10U, that sells for around $3,800. They are currently evaluating the market for a more advanced three-chip camera)

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN

Sandston worked with JVC and Hollywood post facility LaserPacific (www.laser-pacific.com) to design a dailies system to meet Pirates' creative needs and deadline, "Most of the interest in this process grows out of time pressures and cost pressures on how to do previews economically but we have found that the real interest now comes from the creative filmmaker's ability to use this process to create a much more polished preview," says Leon Silverman, senior VP at LaserPacific. He says his facility has worked on nearly 20 feature films in the past 18 months, providing custom solutions to companies using digital dailies and previews by providing HD telecine transfer, D-VHS and DVD dailies, digital intermediates, and HD and SD projection systems.

On Pirates LaserPacific transferred the camera negative to HD D-5 and digitized that to Avid Meridian media. Those files were loaded on to FireWire drives, sent to JBFilms and put on Sandston's Avid systems. This gave Pirates editors Craig Wood, Stephen Rivkin and Arthur Schmidt a much better image to edit with than if it had come off of Beta SP or even Digi Beta dailies.

That quality enabled them to screen early cuts right off the Avid. "We took the projector [D-ILA G150CL] from JVC and ran the output of the Avid through it and did screenings for ourselves. Then in our screening room we did two tests for a small audience -- there were so many visual effects you couldn't show it to a large audience until they were done.

"What it did was allow us to do this 11-week post," Sandston emphasizes. "I could never have pulled off the preview, filled all the visual effects and had a screening if we were on film because I could never get everything out to 2K fast enough."

In one case, reports Silverman, it was 5pm the day before a preview. One of the effects shots, from the primary effects house on the film, Industrial Light & Magic, hadn't been updated. ILM sent the shot via a fiber connection to LaserPacific where it was quickly cut into the picture.

On Armageddon, Sandston says, there were five Avid editors cutting the picture digitally and 24 assistant editors working concurrently in film, constantly chasing the digital edit, making prints and getting ready for previews. On Pirates he had three Avid editors and just two assistant editors working in film." This way I've got a smaller but much more focused group. If you go up to the editing suites for Bad Bays II (which did go digital IP, but stayed with film dailies) there's 900,000 feet of film on the floor, on the Pirates side there's 10,000 feet of film." Bottom line is that Sandston saved a lot of money on Pirates and that money went back into visual effects and the shooting.