I NTERV I EW | SET- UP
JOINING THE DOTS ACQUISITION NEWS Production futures are pushing workflow companies together to prepare the ground for what is to come
JULIAN MITCHELL / PICTURES X2X
B ack in the day, when digital cinematography was a nascent technology, there was a land grab by electronic image manufacturers, who wanted to establish the status quo and the pecking order. Initially, there were a few digital cameras – some were extensions of university projects and others arrived through the passion of individuals. However, right at the start, there was a camera made by Thomson called the Viper and it had a party trick: it was able to record a fully uncompressed Raw signal straight off the sensor with a mode called Filmstream. This was very new back then. This was enhanced by the Viper’s ability to record Raw image data with all camera correction settings switched off,
allowing post to apply corrections to the Raw data the way you want it to and not the way the camera would do this. Not all digital cameras available in the market did this – they still applied small amounts of correction to the image, giving you less control over the image correction and grading process once in post. The problem was that recording such a large amount of data required new storage technology. There were solutions: a German- made recorder, the Director’s Friend, was the size of a shopping trolley and its fans sounded like a tractor when they started up – inevitably, it wasn’t what the market wanted. New companies sprang up with more promise, like STwo and Codex, with platforms that became hubs for all the
We are already quite a global business and have engineering set- ups across the world different flavours of footage, for online and offline distribution. In fact, it was Codex that eventually carved that niche for itself at the high end, with a system that matured in the right direction for all concerned, building in security and extremely fast transfer drives to deal with the gargantuan amounts of data needed for cameras like the Arri Alexa
ABOVE X2X chief design offer, Marc Dando (left), and X2X CEO, Eric Dachs (right)
DECEMBER 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 09
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