Evolving Workflows, Tapeless Delivery, and the Digital Lab

It’s been a busy year for MTI Film. The company has started a services business in Hollywood, creating an all-digital workflow for television, film, and commercial post. TNT’s Rizzoli and Isles and CBS’s The Defenders are both using MTI’s new facility to manage shows that are acquired using a range of camera systems including RED, ARRI, Phantom, and HDSLR cameras. The facility is also being used as a test bed for technology that will be incorporated into MTI’s Control Dailies system, which the company was demonstrating in a suite at NAB. “We’ve accelerated the process of delivering new software updates through that facility,” MTI VP David McClure told Film & Video at the show.

That includes the recent addition of 10 new formats to Control Dailies, including RED Epic, Alexa ARRIRAW and ProRes, and Convergent Design NanoFlash – basically, if the camera format exists, MTI supports it. MTI also introduced Remote Control Dailies, a compact system that brings the full Control Dailies system on location. The package includes an HP z800 workstation with 24 TB of direct-attached storage, a 24-inch HP LCD screen and a 24-inch JVC 4:4:4 broadcast monitor, a Qio card reader and an LTO-5 tape drive and sells for $125,000. F&V spoke to McClure in the company’s demo suite at the Renaissance hotel during the NAB show.

Film & Video: What deliverables does Control Dailies support?

David McClure: Popular formats for dailies are supported right out of the system. The original goal was to speed up the delivery of film dailies, but now the process is almost entirely tapeless. SR tapes were generally used as a master for assets before we started outputting ProRes and DNxHD. ProRes is really big for TV programming. And now, with the tape-shortage situation in Japan, more people have moved to alternative digital formats. Archiving of original camera material is part of the process now, and some workflows involve going back to the original camera material for their masters. We support the full range of approaches ‘ we don’t expect our customers to adhere to any one workflow.

Are there any evolving trends in terms of how customers are using Control Dailies?

Over the past few months, we’ve had people putting multiple-workstation systems together. They can put many projects through one system and keep working as rendering happens in the background. We’ve added intelligence for processes on how encoding and de-Bayering gets prioritized, all on one system.

There’s a move toward portable digital facilities that supplement or replace the role of traditional post houses. How do you address that?

Remote Control Dailies, which we’re introducing here at NAB, is built with shipping cases included. You can set up your dailies in a hotel room and shoot in whichever state has the best tax breaks that month. Hopefully, you can then send footage over a wire to your editorial house. There are a lot of “digital labs” out there, but we’re the most efficient solution. This product has been in development for more than eight years. The initial goal was to increase [dailies] throughput, but we’re now responding to individual feature requests coming from everyone from assistant editors to a facility like Efilm that looks to us for color management solutions that don’t cut any bits off from the original footage.

Do you support the new IIF-ACES workflow?

Some of it is built into the system already. Basically, ACES standardizes a lot of color management that has historically been facility-specific. Control Dailies includes four kinds of color processing – input LUT, grade LUT, ASC CDL, and output LUT ‘ so we can do the various transforms that are required. We’re not doing 16-bit float, but we’re going to sit back and listen and see what the market will tolerate.

Are you supporting stereo 3D dailies?

Not yet.

Have you felt pressure to support them?

We felt the pressure last year. During that time we’ve been working to be as camera-agnostic as possible, and to miniaturize things on-set and near-set. Sometimes a customer has a RED show or an Alexa show, but maybe they did a scene with the Sony XDCAM. Saving them a lot of trouble by making a workflow that manages footage from all those cameras in the same way, including handling metadata and logging, was more important [than moving quickly into stereo 3D].

What’s your goal here at NAB?

At this show, things are changing very fast. We have to be responsive. There is a lot of enabling technology, but it’s very costly. How much do people want to do on set? It’s changing from day to day. We need to find out what people need and see how quickly we can test those workflows and pass the technology along.