DEFINITION June 2018

SHOOT STORY INFINITY WAR

going to be some very data heavy days quite far out. We were able to plan with Marvel and then push through some huge capital expenditure and buy multiple SANs. We then operated a new workflow where we had to run two SANs simultaneously which were striped together to deal with the amount of data for rendering and playback. 40 TeraBytes became 80 TeraBytes in the processing which seems a strange way of going about things, the last thing you’d expect to do when you have more data than you’d ever had before is to double it. But that worked out quite well for us.” The cameras did record to Codex recorders and the production did have four Codex Vaults but all they used those for was for off-loading data in to their system. “So DITs and data wranglers on-set were passing transfer drives to us which we ingested. When we were in Atlanta and they were shooting on the stages there were deliveries of drives twice a day. We also have a 4K DCI screening room and the Directors, the Russo brothers, came over at wrap to review the morning’s rushes.” LAS VEGAS WRINKLE The workflow at Pinewood Atlanta was going very well from the theory of the new workflow to the way transfer drives were being ingested, WE HAD TO MOVE 40TB A DAY TO THE MARVEL DATA CENTRE IN LAS VEGAS

TeraBytes a day across to them, Marvel store all of their own digital negatives there and then use it for VFX pulls.” It was lucky that Pinewood had that connection so they could put the media in the right place on the other side of the country. Pinewood were also managing the grading of the dailies and the archiving to LTO tape. What was different about this production was that they were dealing with other films’ productions at the same time, this is the MCU after all and other films like Guardian of the Galaxy 2 and Black Panther were also in the system or parts of them were. Edits and VFX approval was needed by the other side of the country from the executives in Atlanta. To come are Ant-man and the Wasp which is still in production and the new Spiderman movie is starting up as well as a new Avengers production. If you’ve seen Infinity War you will recognise the beautiful city of Edinburgh in some of the scenes. Pinewood had to pack up their technology and take it on the road to Scotland from Atlanta. To deal with the location Pinewood had to take over a whole floor of a hotel in the city, this couldn’t be any hotel but one that had doors big enough to fit it all in. Amazingly everything was managed on location to duplicate what people were used to in Atlanta. Everything but the Las Vegas centre transfers which were handled by sending LTO tapes to Atlanta and then on to Vegas.

but Marvel forgot to tell them a certain extra step. “We actually had to move the data every day across the country to a data centre in Las Vegas. We had a 10GB connection between our facility and this data centre and were sending up to 40

ABOVE Apart from Infinity War being shot and processed, there were other films going through Pinewood.

DEFINITION JUNE 2018

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