When we spoke to John Coghill last month, the finishing touches had just been put on the Dalsa Digital Cinema Center, the exclusive rental source for the new Dalsa Origin camera. Having purchased the assets of Broadcast Plus last year, Dalsa set about keeping that rental operation open while constructing a new, fully functional facility that would demonstrate an operational workflow that can handle the Dalsa Origin’s 4K, 402 MB/sec output.
The facility boasts a camera prep room wired with fiber-optic connections to a machine room where digital negatives are processed, adjacent to a room holding servers (currently with 30 TB of storage, but with room to expand to 100 TB), a render farm with 120 nodes for essentially real-time processing, and a three-bay color-correction suite. That suite can control the Christie CP 2000 DLP projector set up in Dalsa’s 33-seat screening room for live on-screen color correction. It’s all in the name of education — Dalsa is setting up a number of training programs to get users up to speed with the new 4K workflow.
"We don’t want to get into the post-production business, by any means," says Coghill. "It’s inevitable we will do some client deliveries — we’ve got a lot of interest from guys shooting commercials and from VFX people, so there may be some client deliveries there — but that’s not our intent."
The ASC technology committee broke in the facility at the end of March, shooting a test film on March 28 and looked at it projected two days later. Coghill wouldn’t say more about who’s using the camera, although he said Dalsa’s talking to "a bunch of different productions." The biggest problem right now is making sure Dalsa can fully support the camera’s pilot users. "We want to make sure the production and post guys understand the whole workflow," he says. "You can go to a post house that’s building out datacentric post facilities, and our guys will be there to consult on basic workflow, metadata management, and provide on-set support and pre-production support. We also want to get involved with the client at the very beginning to make the best use of all the tools in the pre-production and design phase. With the extraordinary exposure latitude we have with this camera, traditional toolsets don’t cut it."
Dalsa rents its 4K Digital Camera, complete with data recorder, for $3000 a day. More information is at the Dalsa Digital Cinema Web site: www.dalsa.com/dc/index.asp
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