Based on what its membership survey documents as a major shift from film to digital production on the part of commercialmakers, AICE, the postproduction trade association, has issued a series of Recommended Practices governing digital camera masters and the creation of digital dailies. The guidelines became a necessity, said Burke Moody, executive director of the AICE, in that the prevalence of digital lensing has sparked business, creative and logistical issues for editorial/post houses.
“We’ve gone from a format and a workflow–35 and 16 millimeter film–that’s been in place for 50 or 60 years to one that’s constantly changing and evolving,” noted Moody. “Digital picture acquisition has turned everything in the postproduction world upside down. Our Recommended Practices have been issued to help provide some benchmarks for stakeholders to adhere to.”
The Recommended Practices document, developed by the AICE Technical Committee, establishes criteria for digital camera masters and digital dailies. It strongly recommends that responsibility for dailies be assigned prior to production to ensure that the dailies are properly prepared and delivered to the editorial house and that the cost to prepare them is included in either the production company’s or the post facility’s budget. Furthermore it warns that failure to provide dailies completely and correctly will result in additional and unnecessary costs to the client, loss of time in the post schedule and delays in the finishing and delivery schedules.
Indeed the rise of digital production has made dailies even more important, affirmed Moody. “The necessity of dailies has not gone away You cannot cut with camera raw footage. There’s been talk about taking media out of the digital camera and plugging it into an edit system. But that simply doesn’t happen in commercials where you have multiple layers, multiple versions, dissolves, visual effects. Dailies have to be created specifically for whatever editing system you have in your shop, creating the proper workflow in order to edit efficiently.”
The creation of dailies must be carefully coordinated–whether it’s done by the DIT on set, a digital lab or the editorial company. “When dailies are not properly prepared, that can cost a ton of time and money,” said Moody. “There’s so much more material with digital capture when the camera is kept running–unlike film where you have to be conscious about the cost of footage. If dailies don’t match the specs and are not done right, then the dailies have to be redone–and with 10 to 15 hours of digital material, that can take quite a while which means a lot of down time at a facility. That impacts editorial companies whose delivery deadlines don’t change.”
Being on top of such issues is critical, continued Moody, because “the digital landscape changes constantly. With RED, ALEXA, the high-speed cameras, your 5Ds, 7Ds, Blackmagic has something coming down the pipeline, and who knows what else, we need guidelines to provide some stability and the AICE Technical Committee is looking to address that need with its Recommended Practices.”
Over the past 12 to 18 months, the Technical Committee has been holding regular virtual meetings–including an in-person session at this year’s NAB Convention in Las Vegas–to formulate practical guidelines. For a full rundown of those Recommended Practices, click here.
Survey
The need for and the gist of the Recommended Practices as devised by the Technical Committee were confirmed by the results of a national AICE survey conducted in June. A detailed questionnaire was distributed to owners and executive producers at AICE member shops in all eight chapters–seven in the U.S. (Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco) and one in Toronto. A total of 75 editorial houses from the eight markets participated.
Moody related that these 75 companies estimated that roughly 90 percent of all TV commercials are now shot with digital cameras, underscoring that procedures for making dailies need improvement and that the responsibility for the creation of those dailies must be clarified. Moody provided some historical context. “This all first reared its head about three or four years ago with the advent of the RED camera. That’s when the issue appeared on our radar. Though the issue wasn’t that pressing at the outset given the dominance of film back then, we still had some chapter meetings and discussions. But the red flag was raised over the past year and a half or so. If digital production were still just 10 to 15 percent of what the editorial houses were seeing, then there would have been no need [for guidelines]. But because it [digital] has become ubiquitous in production, it was important for AICE to take a stand.”
According to a majority of survey respondents (between 60 and 70 percent), digital dailies are often provided incorrectly, incompletely, or generally require more work before ingesting into the editing system. The survey also indicated that when dailies are not provided, most editorial facilities are performing the tasks of a “lab,” such as performing one-light corrections.
Billing for dailies is increasingly problematic for editorial houses, according to the survey. Only 13 percent of the respondents said they have been consistently compensated for dailies generation, a quarter said they were compensated frequently and nearly half said they are only able to include costs for dailies on certain jobs.
Furthermore, if the dailies are delivered incorrectly, over half the respondents said they are rarely successful collecting overages for re-making the dailies.
A key goal of the Recommended Practices document is to improve awareness and provide useful criteria for production companies and agencies, said Moody. “Educating everyone about digital production and the generation of dailies is essential for a smoother, more efficient postproduction process,” he noted.
The survey findings also indicate a need for better communication between production and post. For example, only 57 percent of respondents said they were able to communicate regularly with production companies regarding digital capture formats and specs before the shoot; the remainder said this happened on a hit or miss basis. Similarly, discussion with the DIT prior to a shoot is reported to be spotty. Only half of the respondents said it happens on a regular basis.
Overall, the survey indicates that editorial houses are most successful in obtaining properly formatted and prepared digital dailies when they are delivered by a digital lab rather than by the DIT.
Technical Committee
The AICE Technical Committee which developed the Recommended Practices was headed up by Jeff Drury, technical operations manager of the Whitehouse in New York, and included Clayton Hemmert of Crew Cuts in N.Y., Knox McCormac of Optimus in Chicago, Justin Lee of 567vfx in Toronto, Carl Jacobs of Splice in Minneapolis and Austyn Daines of Rock Paper Scissors in Los Angeles. The committee was established in the fall of 2011.
Drury said the Recommended Practices grew out of discussions among AICE members over the explosive growth of file-based production and the problems it presented to editorial and post facilities. “We all felt there was a desire for some technical guidance from the organization on the part of the industry as a whole,” he said.
In the rush to transition to digital capture, said Hemmert, “a number of steps in the postproduction process have been conveniently forgotten,” most notably the role of what used to be the film lab. As a result, he says, “there are a lot of jobs that come in with dailies that have not been properly prepared. As postproduction companies, we have to spend money, buy software and train people to correct these problems. Most importantly, we lose time in the edit.”
With the explosion of footage typically shot on any given job, incorrect digital dailies can be a real headache, Hemmert continued. The common use of multiple cameras, cameras left running for extended periods and no guidance from script notes has required editors to slog through hours and hours of material, all of which must be screened in real time. “You still have to build your selects reels and filter all of this content,” he said. “And often we’re getting a late start because the content is not being delivered in the proper form. Yet our ship dates don’t change. We still have to deliver on time.”
Next up for AICE, said Moody, is to reach out to the ad agency and production communities about the Recommended Practices. He noted that the guidelines have been “distilled down into concise points,” making for a single page document. Moody said that AICE didn’t want to turn out an unwieldy document, instead opting for a succinct set of principles that would “stand the test of time” while having the flexibility of being tweaked accordingly to address a constantly evolving digital world.
