DEFINITION March 2018

SHOOT STORY THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING MISSOURI

ALEXA 65 use has rocketed especially for Marvel shoots which are now always based in Georgia, again for the tax reasons. The ALEXA 65 exclusively uses Codex media for recording so Pinewood have Codex Vault XLs which they use for offloading the ingested media on to their own SANs. “The ALEXA 65 is the highest data rate camera around at the moment, however many of the films jobs we are doing in the UK are actually 35mm- based projects,” says Thom. “We are shooting on a project at the moment which is 4K and 16-bit and those files are in the region of 110MB per frame! To get the performance we need from our SANs we are having to strip systems together. The SANs we use only go up to a certain size but they have the ability to be bolted together; that’s a technique that we started in Atlanta for the Marvel work in order to deal with the large volume of data. 60 drive SANs bolted together doubles the throughput and capacity. We’re now at the point where we’re putting three SANs together to be able to have the throughput to be able to scan such high resolution and bit depth files while also processing. You always have multiple people working on the media so it will be being scanned or ingested while being graded and QC’d. It’s about having enough performance to provide everyone with what they need. We’re always pushing our providers and assessing new technology particularly in the SAN arena. We need the bandwidth to have multiple users accessing various parts of the media as quickly as is required, especially as these frame sizes get larger and larger. The requirement to see the media as soon as possible does lessen; in fact that time frame to see the media gets shorter and shorter.”

RESURGENCE OF FILM Pinewood has also offered the film market some unique services to help bolster a resurgence. But that dents the normal digital workflow so they have had to adjust. “We get phone calls at five or six in the morning asking how things look and it’s still processing as it’s only come out of the film bath three or four hours previously,” says Thom. In the UK Pinewood deal with CineLab in Slough and the new Kodak-owned film processing lab in Pinewood; actually in the old Technicolor building. Films are processed at Kodak Pinewood then scanned at Pinewood Post. “With the 35mm work we offer a ‘scan once’ workflow,” says Thom. “Traditionally it would have been a telecine workflow where it goes through a Spirit or TK of some description and then at the

point of conform the neg is brought back out the vault and scanned on a Pin registered scanner. We scan everything at the intended resolution and quality from the dailies, it then becomes essentially a digital workflow. The neg then goes to the vault and hopefully never comes out again.” Pinewood scan to DPX files to a much higher resolution and bit depth than the traditional US mode of telecine to ProRes. They make editorial proxies from that rather than working from a compressed file from the start. “There is a myth that film processing is much more expensive than digital but with film there’s a lot you don’t have to provide alongside a digital workflow,” continues Thom. “There’s no rental of media: the digital media can be more expensive than the film costs if you include data management and DIT costs. It often balances out depending on the volume that is shot. Film shoots are often more economical with their shooting ratios; they don’t leave the camera running like they do with digital sometimes.”

THERE IS A MYTH THAT FILM PROCESSING IS MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE

ABOVE Dane Brehm’s DIT set-up for Three Billboards.

DEFINITION MARCH 2018

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