By Carolyn Giardina

LOS ANGELES --

In commercial production, a new format once translated to a new type of videotape with higher resolution, and a different size or shape. But today, the next development looming on the horizon is not videotape but data, a high-resolution combination of zeros and ones.

Welcome to the IT world, where frames are now files–files that need to be stored and managed. Working in this new environment will require learning new concepts, new techniques and new processes. And higher resolution is only one of several reasons to consider this transition.

“There are compelling reasons to start to think about a datacentric workflow if a facility has imagination and creates a workflow that in some way emulates what they presently do in the video realm, but takes advantage of the speed and flexibility that data offers,” said Larry Chernoff, who is principal of Chernoff Touber Associates, a Beverly Hills-based consulting firm, and who also retains his title as chairman of Ascent Media Creative Services, Santa Monica.

“You go to data because you will find that over time, using a data topography throughout the facility and throughout the workflow is actually going to speed things up with more creative options,” he explained. “It’s kind of similar to what happened with the Avid –the Avid provided greater creative opportunities in a shorter period of time.

“Data provides you an opportunity ultimately to have little bit more of a nonlinear experience finishing that you are used to in your creative editorial,” he said. “And working with data in the finishing process will give you a lot more looks at what your project could be, rather than the rigid nonlinear process that we’ve been following for the last twenty years.”

A move to data is also a decision that impacts production. “If you are still going to shoot film, then the aspect ratio of film needs to be captured in total, because people are using the entire film canvas,” Chernoff said. “If you start shooting HD [which has a different aspect ratio], inevitably you have to compromise. Data captures all the information and allows you to manipulate that information into any format, whether it’s HD, SD, PAL, or cinema formats. You can do anything with data.”

 

FRAMES AS FILES

An image has three main qualities: the number of horizontal lines of resolution, which is measured by “pixels” in the data world; vertical lines of resolution (also “pixels”); and bit depth (the number of bits representing the value of each pixel).

In today’s world of standard definition video, NTSC video is displayed at 640 X 480 lines of resolution; in high definition, the most commonly used format is 1920 X 1080 lines.

But many pundits believe that when data production gets off the ground, commercials will be produced in “2k” data, or 2,048 X 1,556 lines. This is the resolution commonly used today on features for digital intermediate work–which is the process of going from film to data to do tasks such as color correction and to create a digital master, before returning to film for distribution.

The most commonly used 2k data has a 10-bit depth; this combination amounts to storage requirements of 12 megabytes per frame. That is a staggering number, keeping in mind that a 12 megabyte text file equates to the size of a document with more than 600 pages, explained Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) association president Leon Silverman, who is executive VP of Kodak’s Hollywood based post house Laser Pacific, and VP of Kodak’s Entertainment Imaging unit.

Chernoff believes that this is where the spot industry will find its next standard. “There is no reason to think beyond 2k for commercials,” he said. “It is more resolution than they’ve ever had.”

Colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld, who is also president of Company 3, with facilities in Santa Monica and New York, thinks the commercial standard will eventually go higher, as the feature industry is already moving in that direction. Currently, the next peak to which companies are reaching in the feature world is 4k–4,096 X 3,112 lines–or four times the picture information in a 2k file.

Last summer’s Spider-Man 2 is recognized as the first feature to go through a 4k DI process, which was accomplished at Hollywood-based E-FILM. VP of business development Bob Eicholz–an alum of the commercial industry and now-closed 525 Studios–reported that at one point in that project, Spider-Man 2 occupied around 38 terabytes of online storage, and an additional 12 terabytes of “nearline” storage (storage that is accessible but not networked into the facility’s system).

For commercials, of course, these numbers would be significantly smaller. Sonnenfeld explained that one terabyte of storage can accommodate an hour of 2k footage.

Company 3’s Santa Monica office has already been used for DI feature work, and to accommodate these projects, currently offers nearly 60 terabytes of storage, which is now used for both long-form and commercial work.

Meanwhile, some post houses that offer DI services to the feature industry have recognized additional opportunities in offering these services to the advertising community, particularly for finishing cinema commercials. Cinema ads have already been finished at Burbank and Glendale-based Modern VideoFilm, Technicolor Creative Services (TCS) in New York and Toronto, and TCS’s The Moving Picture Company in London, and the aforementioned E-Film.

    See next week’s SHOOT for Part 2 of this series.

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