DEFINITION December 2019

SET- UP | I NTERV I EW

RIGHT Marc Dando is an Emmy award- winning executive, with experience of working with cinematographers and visual effects supervisors

65, which, at present, pushes out around 30 megabytes per frame. PIX BUYOUT This year, Codex was bought by Pix, a well-known, highly secure view-and-review system for the media and entertainment industries. The deal was done in April, but now the two companies are to be brought under a single brand identity with the establishment of the X2X Media Group. Codex’s CEO and now X2X’s chief design officer, Marc Dando, explains the thinking. “The main reason we wanted to consolidate everything under a single group was partly because we wanted everyone to feel they’re were working for the same business under a common name. Also, we will be adding further business units to the group in the future,” he says. “We are already quite a global business and have engineering set-ups across the world, where the talent actually is. We have tremendous teams in Wellington, Budapest and, interestingly enough, we made the move to Leamington Spa a couple of years ago – primarily for our design and manufacturing group, but the access to northern universities and to a vibrant local video games talent pool has been a bonus.” THE SYNERGY It doesn’t take long to see why these companies have found each other. Without much imagination, you can see they aren’t far away from each other in a production flow. “The minute you take a piece of media out of a Codex system, it can go straight

user can use their login and immediately start sharing and collaborating with the content. What we’re doing is capturing the media. People then annotate notes to, say, visual effects and anyone else who needs information about the media. That’s happening immediately. People are reviewing immediately. We’re then sending the camera originals to the cloud. At that point, we’re also creating the deliverables for editorial and, if you have a dailies colourist in there, you can apply a colour profile.” He continues: “Also, if you wanted to, you could also be doing a turnover for VFX within about ten minutes. That sound ambitious, but it happens on a very regular basis, especially when people are in additional photography, because they’ve only got 14 days to shoot a lot of extra scenes at the end. What we’re trying to do is just streamline all the processes to make modern filmmaking more simplified with modern automation processes.” THE FUTURE Codex has been well-known for helping out the highest-end ‘tent pole’ movies, but Dando thinks the introduction of smaller and faster media will help its technology be seen on smaller productions. He concludes: “With the release of the new lower-cost, high-performance media for the Alexa Mini, for example, we’ve got a much wider market just with that product. The other thing we’re doing is releasing a range of CF Express media; this will be a very popular format. Canon has already released its C500 Mark II camera, which will support the media. That’s going to a much wider group of content creators than we normally service. We can offer these people the same workflows as the leading studios, which is a great thing for them.”

into a Pix dailies system, so actually it’s just completing that line. We have an ambition to take the same level of security that we have within the Pix environment and take that to the production environment, so the content is much more secure than it is at this point,” explains Dando. X2X already has a proof-of-concept product on a live set at the moment. “Essentially, what we have done is put a server on-set, so every time the camera gets cut, you immediately have access to that last clip. This isn’t to replace video assist – it very much works alongside it,” insists Dando. “The benefit is that any Pix

We’re trying to streamline all the processes to make modern filmmaking more simplified

10 DEF I N I T ION | DECEMBER 20 1 9

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