Red Rental and Service Facility Complements New DI Theater Upstairs

Offhollywood Digital made a play for the New York market last month, when it expanded its operations to include a full-fledged camera rental and service facility dedicated to the Red Digital Cinema Camera. That meant a sizable investment in real estate as well as technology – the new rental facility takes up a full floor in the company's Soho location. Post-production, including the work by colorists Milan Boncich and Robbie Renfrow in a brand-new DI suite and theater, takes place upstairs.
“What’s really exciting is what we’re going to do in the theater,” company CTO and co-founder Mark Pederson told Film & Video, explaining that Offhollywood has cut a deal making Fotokem its exclusive partner for film-outs. “We’re taking great pains testing and dialing in film-out LUTs with Fotokem to guarantee a perfect translation,” he says, explaining that 2K and 35mm projectors will live side-by-side in the same theater. Pederson also plans to push low-priced Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM) and Digital Cinema Package (DCP) creation, reasoning that with its newer equipment, Offhollywood should be able to aggressively compete on price against competitors who invested earlier, in more expensive equipment.

“The Clipster 3 is a $130,000 piece of hardware,” Pederson says, referring to the DVS product that, along with the Scratch system from Assimilate, enables Offhollywood’s real-time Red 4K workflow. “In the grand scheme of hardware, it’s not really expensive because it also does a lot of other things. So while other companies are trying to recoup their investment in older technology, we’re just now expanding.” And Pederson thinks the timing is right because DCP is starting to gain new importance in the indie-film market. “Last year’s Venice Film Festival was done completely in DCP, and they went crazy for it,” he said. “You know the amount of logistics it takes for a festival to deal with tapes and films? Now you’re looking at a playlist, like iTunes. It’s a joy.”

Offhollywood has done indie feature DI work in the past, including all the post for last year’s twice-Oscar-nominated Frozen River, but the new theater will provide a more robust environment for color work. “The DI process is pretty cut-and-dried to us now,” Pederson says. “There isn’t really any dark magic. The big fork in the road is, for feature work, are you going to color-grade in Rec. 709 – that’s HD color space, and maybe you’ll go to film or not go to film – or do you grade to a film LUT? We’re going to start pushing that more, especially since we have everything dialed in with Fotokem.”

That decision depends in part on what the project is. For a project that’s destined to be exhibited on film, using a film LUT will naturally yield the most accurate results when it’s time for prints to be made. But filmmakers can sometimes squeak by with nothing more than an HDCAM master. “We had a film in competition at Sundance this year called Toe to Toe, which was shot on the Red in 2K,” Pederson recalls. “We DI’d it here, and just made them a festival screener – what we call a director’s master, which is progressive output. They sold the movie [to Strand Releasing] for a limited theatrical release and then DVD and television, and they’re literally using our festival screener as the master. It passed broadcast QC. It’s kind of rare, and it’s flukey. But I felt happy for them. As we go through this process, we know what filmmakers are, ultimately, going to need. We explain the advantages and disadvantages [of different deliverables] up front.”

As much as Pederson hopes to get the various options and packages for indie filmmakers down to a science, he acknowledges that lots of things are still in flux, including what he thinks is a largely untapped market for 3D branding and commercial content for cinema exhibition, as well as big changes in dailies workflow – which may soon barely be a workflow at all. “Hardware acceleration with the Red Rocket card will change everything,” he declares. “Dailies, which are a significant revenue point for film labs, are completely going away. Already, producers are saying, ‘Well, how can I process my Red footage on set and walk away with the media?’ They can completely do that if they have the Red Rocket card, and they’re already doing this in Europe in different ways.

“The next-generation cameras are probably going to let you pull the edit media right off the camera, separate from your camera negative. To me, the writing’s on the wall. In my opinion, if you’re basing a significant part of your business on making money on dailies, you’re going to be extinct very soon. We’re telling producers, ‘We don’t want to do your dailies. We want to help you do your dailies on set, and this is how we’re going to do it – by renting you this card, or device, to do that.'”