Dailies to go: filmmakers want dailies hot off the telecine - Technology

Post, Sept, 2003 by Claudia Kienzle

The digital dailies market is steadily growing because there's a compelling business case to be made for adopting this technology. Digital dailies can streamline the whole workflow by speeding up client screenings and approvals, audience previews and the delivery of motion pictures.And digital dailies can impact the bottom line by eliminating such costs as film processing and audio syncing of film dailies, and the duplication and shipping of screening cassettes.

With digital dailies, freshly shot film is typically telecined to 2K data or HD video and screened using HD-grade playback and projection systems, as opposed to the conventional method where 35mm film is processed, printed and threaded onto a film projector for screening. Either way, the creative team--usually the DP, director, producers, studio executives and talent--gets to evaluate the technical and aesthetic qualities of what's been shot to determine if the production is on track or if changes need to be made.

While film dailies are projected onto a big screen for a select audience in a single screening location, digital dailies can be played back in a nonlinear manner from disk-based systems onto a big screen, or transferred onto (JVC) ProHD D-VHS cassettes, DVD, or other physical media that people can watch in their offices, conference rooms, screening areas, or anywhere the playback equipment is available.

While the term "digital dailies" generally refers to all dailies that are deliverable as a digital file, the term "HD dailies" often describes dailies on HD video.When in the form of a digital file,the most common formats for HD resolution imagery are MPEG-2, MPEG-4,JPEG-2000, Windows Media 9 and Wavelet. For SD resolution, formats can be Avid H-JPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, JPEG-2000, H.323,Wavelet and Windows Media 9.The tape formats for HD dailies include Panasonic DVCPRO HD formal Panasonic HD D-5 and Sony HDCAM.

Once digital dailies are encoded as digital files, they can be streamed via Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or the public Internet to anyone's desktop anywhere for immediate review and approval at very high quality.

But, the potential downside is that once near-film rez imagery and cinema sound have been transformed to digital data files, the content can be copied, pirated, pilfered, misused and released in unauthorized ways.Without adequate security measures to prevent theft--which many vendors now incorporate into their digital dailies solutions--a studio or production company can stand to lose profits, and more importantly, control over the creative properties that sustain their business.

SCREENING DIGITAL DAILIES

"Demand for digital dailies has been increasing steadily," says Steven Cohen, president of Cohen Communications (www.cohencomm.net) in Hollywood."The driving force behind this trend is the growing number of productions shooting outside of Hollywood. By using digital dailies, also known as HD dailies, instead of the time-consuming process of creating a film workprint and synching the mag track, a production can save about $300,000 over the course of an average movie."

Cohen specializes in building digital dailies screening rooms at studios, on location or in trailers on location (the latter done with strategic partner Onsite Media). Among the productions for which he has installed digital dailies screening rooms are Man on Fire (20th Century Fox), Looney Tunes: Back in Action (Warner Bros.) and Underworld (Lakeshore Entertainment).

With another strategic partner, Advanced Media Networks, Cohen also provided remote HD/SD digital dailies systems to Around the World in 80 Days (Walden Media). For this movie, Cohen says, "after the film was sent to Babelburg Studio in Berlin for transfer, the director Frank Coraci and his crew, who were on location in Thailand, received the 5Mb resolution dailies over the Internet (at a dedicated E-1 connection speed of 2.2Mbps) nine hours after the telecine session, rather than waiting five or six days for the film to be processed, printed and shipped through customs.This connection also enabled realtime editorial collaboration between Coraci and the editor Tom Lewis in Berlin."

As part of his full-service digital dailies solutions, Cohen also offers proprietary Rushplay playback software, which imports meta-data from the flex files generated during the telecine session and provides the user with a lot more information, plus an easy way to re-order scenes. "Nonlinear playback is one of the key reasons that movie productions switch from film to digital dailies," Cohen says.

Eyes Post in Toronto, Fotokem in Hollywood, Command Post/Toybox, Toronto, and Riot and LaserPacific in LA are among the facilities equipped with encoders that support Cohen's Rushplay. Cohen also has a Turnkey Facilities package, with a Tandberg encoder, ASI capture station and USB 2.0 hard drives, available for rent. If the production is acquiring with HD instead of film, Cohen works with Mindstar Productions to offer a product called Cinergy--script supervisor software that captures timecode off the HD cameras and creates an ALE (Avid Log Exchange) file of the circle takes, which are used to create a select HD daily roll on hard drives.