ADVERTI SEMENT FEATURE | BROWN I AN MOT ION
A STITCH IN (REAL) TIME... Brownian Motion’s new custom hardware/software offering brings live-stitched preview, playback and instant dailies to VFX arrays
such multicamera rigs, often with a 360° field of view, despite becoming a staple for VFX production, were the only cameras on-set without an easy way to view and playback what they were shooting. Multiview and split screen options offered individual camera feeds, but without the ability to see an interpolated stitch, it was often confusing to view and operate. Waiting days for lab processing and stitched deliverables had also become the default. Brownian Motion sought to speed up that process on array jobs with DIT services offering stitched dailies. This still required the wrangling of vast amounts of data and the time lag that entails, making it a next-day process at best. There was nothing readily
Brownian Motion is a London-based camera rental facility known for offering complete camera equipment packages for high-end digital cinema acquisition. It has always embraced innovation and exploited the crossover between cameras and post- production since the advent of digital acquisition, covering VR solutions, and DIT and data lab services along the way as the company has evolved. The last few years have seen the establishment of a reputation for the design and manufacture of bespoke multicamera array rigs using top-end cameras such as the Alexa Mini, Alexa Mini LF, Red Helium and Red Monstro. Each rig is offered with a Nuke Project Template for a VFX-friendly post workflow, as well as custom-designed power distribution and lens control. THE NEED FOR VFX DAILIES Last year, Brownian Motion serviced film projects such as Hobbs and Shaw , Fast and Furious 9 , Marvel’s Black Widow , Marvel’s Eternals and Disney’s Cruella with custom- designed array rigs. It became apparent that
“The Samsung Portable S drive that’s lightweight a
available on the market that would solve these problems. Someone needed to build a rugged box that stitched camera feeds… “Files can be delivered at wrap or even throughout the day in any flavour of ProRes or DNxHD for instant editorial use”
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED As a piece of equipment with such a
niche use, it was clear that the software such a product ran on would have to be custom written – and the hardware would also have to be to a custom design. The remit for the software was to use the metadata available on the camera SDI feeds from the major camera brands and to embed clip info and time code into an auto-recorded deliverable file. The files needed to be stitched and suitable for offline quality review for selects. From the outset, it was clear that the Brownian Stitchbox would need to be solid-state and location-ready, rugged and robust. Extreme heat and cold and inhospitable environments would be
40 DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 2020
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