Pristine Previews

Advances in portable digital cinema projection and high-def NLEs are now allowing editorial teams to give their early versions a more finished look, conform them and throw them up on a screen. Traditionally the bottleneck in the process is the conform, a process that generally requires that an EDL be sent out to the post facility where the negative is kept. Enter Avid’s DS Nitris, which is letting editors conform on site in HD. If you’re Michael Mann, editing Collateral, you want the ability to work into the wee hours of the morning making changes to a sequence and then to see your new edit projected the next day without going out of house for a full online edit. " Michael Mann screens a film up to five times a week," says Chad Andrews, a partner at Avid reseller Orbit Digital, which helped set up Mann’s internal preview screening pipeline. Working with L.A.-based Avid reseller KeyCode Media, Orbit stress-tested a Nitris to see if it could play three hours of cut feature without any problems. After about a month of testing, the Collateral production took control of the system.

The other reason that previews are looking better is that they’re benefiting from an extension of digital intermediates downstream to an earlier creative point in filmmaking. This makes digital previews a natural progression along the road from digital dailies to the finished product. Color decisions that are made for digital preview screenings can be used as a starting point for DI work and, in some cases, digital previews are just part of the DI process. "Just because you do digital dailies and digital previews doesn’t mean you’re doing a DI," says Greg Ciaccio, VP of operations at Technicolor Creative Services. "But if you are- and you’re scanning film early enough – you can do digital previews from the DI scans, rather than from the HD dailies. And we’re getting to the point where everything’s going to be scanned, rather than just the selects."

Screenings of Collateral took place several different ways. The original 4:4:4 HDCAM master tapes had been digitized for editing as 8-bit 4:2:2 1920x1080i PSF HD files, which could be played out directly from the Nitris into Michael Mann’s screening room on an NEC TriDigital HD4K DLP projector provided by Laser Pacific. For screenings that demanded a little more portability, the show was output in the same format to D5 tape. (HDCAM wasn’t a viable option in this case because it only holds four channels of audio and the production wanted to screen with 5.1 audio mixes.) And toward the end of the show, Orbit experimented with a less-expensive QuBit server from QuVis, which compresses the data at a rate of 10:1. "What fits on 12 146 GB Avid drives on the Nitris fits on two [drives] on the QuBit – but it looks exactly the same," claims Andrews. A feature ends up taking anywhere between 50 and 80 GB of space on a QuBit server, according to QuVis VP of digital cinema George Scheckel.

Higher quality was required outside the director’s screening room and so Laser Pacific handled digital-preview duties on a total of 30 key screenings, including the world premiere at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. That meant going back to the 4:4:4 HDCAM SR masters for color-correction rather than working with 4:2:2 versions from the Nitris. (For projects shot on film, Laser Pacific scans negative at either 6K or 4K, then downreses the scans to 2K.)

"We use our supercomputer technology, which allows us to assemble a film in a fraction of the time that it can be assembled on the Nitris," explains Laser Pacific Executive VP Leon Silverman, claiming that Laser Pacific conforms at four times the speed of a single DS Nitris system. Laser Pacific handles temp dubbing for each show and brings it into a digital theater with a 30-foot screen where it resides on a QuBit while three or four days of color timing take place.

With fears about Internet piracy coming to a head, some filmmakers are trying to keep full-length screening versions in-house as long as possible. "The entire process of filmmaking is going to be coming more and more in-house," predicts Pat Ready of Avid reseller Pivotal Post (North Hollywood), which has jumped into the field in a big way, helping set up digital screening pipelines for Warner Bros.’ Alexander and Ocean’s 12 and DreamWorks’ Shark Tale. "At the top of the list, across the board, of reasons for bringing an Avid DS Nitris into the cutting room was that the producers wanted their show, in HD, to stay within those four walls."

It takes time to conform on a Nitris – Ready said a four-hour cut of Alexander with some 4000 edits required a solid 24 hours of digitizing- and the whole process puts extra demands on the assistant editors, who have to coordinate schedules to make sure cuts are locked with enough time built in for the digitizing process.

Budgetary concerns still restrict the options available, even on big studio films. The original plan on Ocean’s 12, Ready says, was to work in 2K all the way from previews through DI to the final release. But when the production decided to trade up to a 4K DI process, costs prohibited running the previews at 4K, so they were done in HD instead. The first screenings were played from a D5 using three-channel digital audio from the Avid; for the first actual preview in September, a six-channel audio mix was loaded directly onto the D5 tape.

The next big step for Avid is the introduction of the DNxHD codec for editing compressed HD files in an offline environment. The first beta user of an Avid Adrenaline using DNxHD, according to Ready, will be Warner Bros.’ Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. "This is Tim Burton’s first movie where he’s not printing film," Ready says. "Now that he’s decided HD is good enough to screen and view, they need an in-house way of viewing their cuts. The Nitris system was on deck, but the timing worked out perfectly so the beta test of Adrenaline HD coincided with their needs.

"Once the beta is complete, starting in January of 2005 or so, we’ll be able to provide systems that can do HD at a 4:1 or 6:1 compression ratio, which will allow the cost of the whole package to fully compete with going to a facility or doing an upres. There is no conforming. What the editor sees is what is going to be projected, and you’re outputting to a HD deck as simply as you were outputting to a beta deck before. That’s the only significant piece of equipment they’re going to have to learn." As a bonus, the DNxHD codec offers built-in watermarking, which will help trace the source of any leaks.

As the processes evolve, what’s most gratifying for post professionals is to watch filmmakers embrace the new workflows. Leon Silverman cites Martin Scorsese’s reaction to the screening room Laser Pacific built for The Aviator as proof that HD has forever changed the way filmmakers see their work in progress.

"It was such an interesting experience, watching Scorsese see digital images for the first time," he says. "I thought this would be a difficult sort of meeting, where the images wouldn’t really make it in terms of quality. But he responded incredibly well- to the point where he essentially ended up buying the projector he was renting from us for his screening room. And for filmmakers who understand the images as well as Scorsese or Mann, the image is important."

Digital Preview Screening

When picture is being locked for previews:
>> For film, start scanning negative
>> For digital, retrieve original camera data

Conform feature from EDL

Record edited feature out to tape or server

Color-correct

Lay back temp audio tracks (usually the night before preview)

Head out to preview theater; bring servers/tape decks and digital projector rental if needed