The Fincher Feature Is Billed as the First Film Shot Entirely at 6K

Billed as the first feature film shot entirely at 6K resolution, David Fincher's Gone Girl is also the first studio feature edited entirely in Adobe Premiere Pro CC, by two-time Oscar-winner Kirk Baxter, ACE. Needless to say, Adobe is giddy about that news. And Nvidia, which makes GPUs that drive Adobe's hardware-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine, is almost as excited.

Nvidia is launching a new generation of its Quadro workstation GPUs at SIGGRAPH this week (see our coverage here), and the company announced that Gone Girl is the first feature film to use the brand-new Quadro K5200 GPU in its pipeline. Red footage was converted to DPX using a GPU-accelerated system for efficient delivery to VFX. For the creative edit, footage was converted to 2.5K ProRes files, corresponding to a 5K center extraction, and the editors viewed a 1920×1080 timeline. The Quadro-based workflow also supported up to four streams of 6K multi-camera playback with repositioning, stabilization and color-correction happening in real time, Nvidia said, and also allowed real-time downscaling of 6K footage to 4K.

GPU debayering eliminated the need for specialized hardware to accelerate the processing of Red footage, allowing multiple workstations to be used rather than funneling everything through a single system equipped with a Red Rocket card. 

If you want to see Gone Girl, your first chance to view it with a paying audience will be September 26, when it opens the New York Film Festival. If you're wondering what kind of hardware it takes to make a Premiere Pro cutting room operate at peak efficiency — and we suspect that, on a David Fincher film, anything that doesn't operate at peak efficiency is out the door — here are the workstations employed for Gone Girl's various pixel-crunching processes.

Four HP Z820 Workstations
Intel Xeon E5-2670 8-core 2.6 GHz (Q1 2012)
Nvidia K5200
128 GB DDR3
Two HP Z-Turbo 256 GB drives w/sustained 1.8 GB/s throughput
SolarFlare Dual-Port 10 Gb network adapter

Two HP Z820 Workstations
Intel Xeon E5-2697 12-core 2.7 GHz (Q3 2012)
Nvidia K6000
256 GB DDR3 RAM
Cubix Expansion Chassis
Two FusionIO IoDrive 1.6 TB w/sustained 2.6 GB/s throughput
64 TB Gspeed EsPro
SolarFlare Dual-Port 10 Gb network adapter

One HP Z820 Workstation
Intel Xeon E5-2697 12-core 2.7 GHz (Q3 2012)
Nvidia K5200
128 GB DDR3 RAM
AJA Io 4K
Two FusionIO IoStorm 512 GB w/sustained 2.1 GB/s throughput

Two 2011 Mac Pro Workstations
Nvida K5200 graphics
64 GB DDR3 RAM

Source: Nvidia Case Study