Just like Dwight needed a hardtop with a decent engine and a big trunk in director Robert Rodriguez’s visual comic book extravaganza Sin City, The Orphanage had some specific needs of its own to fit into the director’s workflow. All three studios supplying VFX for the film (Hybride, CafeFX and The Orphanage) had to be able to handle the 4:4:4 pipeline that began with the output of the Sony F950 HDCAM SR camera.
"Prior to last summer, our video-handling was off single HDCAMs or single-link Digital Betacams," says Carl Walters, head of editorial at The Orphanage, which handled effects for "That Yellow Bastard," one of three Sin City storylines. "When we found out that we were going to work on Sin City, we had to find a way to play back the tapes that were going to be delivered and also find a way to ingest them into our current VFX workflow."
Walters immediately purchased a Sony SRW-5000 deck to handle the HDCAM SR tape format, then laid down a dual-link pipeline throughout The Orphanage. The next challenge was capturing the footage. Prior to Sin City, Walters took in any video source material through Final Cut Pro. This wouldn’t work for Sin City. "No one supplying cards for Macintosh OS X had a working dual-link system that was adequate. There were cards out there, but we didn’t feel the quality of the images would maintain the beauty of the format Robert shot in," says Walters. His research led him to SpectSoft, a Linux-based edit platform that could write out full-quality DPX file sequences. The Orphanage built out a customized version of the SpectSoft RaveHD system with upgraded firmware and a Xena card from AJA to work with the SRW-5000. With a two-gigabit dual-fiber disk array attached, The Orphanage was able to ingest all of the tape clones received from Rodriguez — with some last-minute coding fixes by Spectsoft lead engineer Jason Howard.
The most common pipeline problem was dropped frames. "We constantly had to nudge our throughput capability," says Walters. Another common problem was correctly ingesting the overcranked footage that Rodriguez shot at 60 fps and 30 fps. "In addition to using 60i ingest on the RaveHD system, we also wrote a little path through Adobe After Effects, which we use in-house as our main composite tool. But we also wrote a template through After Effects that allowed us to interpret the footage in the manner that Robert wanted."
For dailies screening and communication between the effects house and the director, The Orphanage used a proprietary product from Hybride called HySync, which allowed two parties in remote locations to view the same Quicktime file, pause on a frame and annotate directly on the image itself. "Robert never visited the Orphanage during the course of the project," says Walters. "It’s kind of a testament to the pipeline we had in place." During principal photography Rodriguez edited on his Avid and then FTPed the EDL to The Orphanage in San Francisco, where it was loaded up in Final Cut Pro and conformed using tape clones of the camera masters. (See more about the pros of working in 4:4:4 RGB in our cover story.)
Rodriguez shot Sin City entirely on green screen, one reason for acquiring in 4:4:4 RGB. Chroma-keying is easier due to more information in the green channel, which in turn allows for better matte extraction.
