The photochemical giant Eastman-Kodak Company
recently announced its $30.5 million purchase of Laser-Pacific, a
facility known for its digital engineering innovations in
film-originated entertainment. Eastman-Kodak’s senior vice president
Eric Rodli, who is also president of entertainment imaging products and
services, and Emory Cohen, president and co-founder of Laser-Pacific,
spoke separately with us about their views of the future at this newly
combined company.
F&V: Kodak first entered the high-end post market by building a
facility, Cinesite, around a technology, Cineon, in 1992. Your second
move in this area was to purchase a vanguard post facility,
Laser-Pacific, with a reputation for engineering leadership. How will
this change your business?
Eric Rodli: It’s still kind of early to tell. Obviously we have some
ideas but we won’t close for another couple of months. To me it’s a
logical evolution of moving from early technology to demonstrate how
film and digital technology work together. If you think about Cinesite,
it was there as much to demonstrate improvements in a film system based
on computer and digital technology. We look at Laser-Pacific as not
only premier technology innovators but as having a customer-focused,
solution-oriented team of people. It’s one thing to have good
technology; it’s a whole different thing to get that technology into
the marketplace, solve problems and keep customers happy. What I expect
to learn from the Laser-Pacific team is how to innovate and
operationalize, to get more services and technology from the ideas of
bright people into the market.
F&V: Some of the largest engineering-driven facilities that have
been on the leading/bleeding edge are now owned by manufacturers or
very large companies-take Thomson’s Technicolor and Ascent Media’s
constellation of companies, for example. What does this say about the
business of pushing forward on the cutting edge of post?
Rodli: You may or may not find in post that you need to be of a certain
scale or really very focused, smaller entities. There’s still the
aspect of handling customer relationships and creativity. You can be
very successful as a smaller company here, too.
F&V: Kodak’s original camera-negative business, which is highly
profitable, is under threat from new electronic capture solutions. What
is Kodak’s strategy to deal with this threat, and how does the purchase
of Laser-Pacific play into this strategy?
Rodli: As someone who ran a video rental company [ Bexel ] before I
came here, I think digital will continue to offer an alternative to
film, but I think film’s got a long life. Our strategy is to extend,
through a couple of things, the benefits of film for many years to
come. Product innovation- our 7218 and 5218- has been very well
received as brand new stock that is better than other film stock and
keeps raising the bar for video. Part of the desire to acquire
Laser-Pacific is to do something similar to what we did with Cinesite:
demonstrate to the market how film works in the digital world. They’re
going to help us innovate even faster hybrid solutions so that you can
shoot on film and immediately digitize it and be very efficient in a
digital postproduction world (digital intermediates). I’m convinced
that the team will help extend film by showing how quickly you can get
film into a digital space- that’s the cornerstone. And then demonstrate
it so that technology can spread in the industry… including Laser’s
competitors.
Ways to Work: Ascent Streams Dailiesift
Los Angeles-The squeeze of ever-compressing post schedules for
prime time has spawned a new digital dailies system, Breezeway, at the
Ascent Media companies. While 60 to 70 percent of clients at Ascent’s
Level Three take their dailies via DVD, producers on location-intensive
shows have been trying the new proprietary system, says managing
director Darrell Anderson.
Dailies can be streamed or downloaded to a laptop for on-set review.
One of the features that Anderson says really facilitates the review
process is the ability to specify take and scene rather than watching a
whole select reel. Breezeway allows a squeezed 16 x 9 picture to be
unsqueezed at the client end and played back at high or low resolution.
Anderson notes that clients are migrating from reviewing 1/2- and
3/4-inch tapes to DVCAM and DVD dailies in greater numbers this season.
"That’s happened in a large way this year," he says, "and next season
we’ll see more and more going toward Internet delivery of dailies."
Recently used for dailies viewing by the producers of Las Vegas,
Breezeway delivers picture quality that nearly equals DVD.
F&V: Project five years down the line and tell us what producers
might expect to see in the next generation of film, digital and hybrid
technology. I’m assuming here that you’re researching other
"bit-bucket" technology.
Rodli: I can surely say that you’ll still see a lot of film being used
for major motion pictures, TV drama and commercials. We’ll continue to
advance the quality of film, and we’ll work to make the digital
post-production workflow better, faster and cheaper, which in turn,
makes it easier to use film. As you say, we’re continuing to invest in
film, hybrid and digital technology. But on the film side, you’ll be
looking at film with greater dynamic range, particularly higher speed
and potentially lower cost. We’re going to continue to find ways to
preserve film as an option and take advantage of certain inherent
things that film can do that it’s not clear digital can meet on the
quality side. I can’t get into much detail, but you can imagine some
future film [types] that are less costly and more efficient in terms of
digital workflow but still have some film characteristics.
F&V: The Electronic Lab was a concept well ahead of its time. How it come about?
Emory Cohen: The Electronic Laboratory, as a technology as well as
methodology of doing post production for prime time TV shows. At that
point (the early 80s) 80 percent of prime time was shot on film and all
of them were finished on film. The Electronic Laboratory was created
concurrently with the developmental phases of some nonlinear editing
systems like the Montage, the Ediflex, and later the Editdroid.
Nonlinear editing and the electronic laboratory needed each other and
together they represented a watershed that changed the way TV was done.
Within five years, 80 percent of shows shot on film were edited
electronically.
F&V: So, in effect, in laying the groundwork for editing
long-format film projects, you also helped lay the foundation for the
universal master and digital intermediates?
Cohen: It is absolutely analogous to what’s going on in digital
intermediates. One significant thing that we did was develop a
supercomputer assembly system. It was the first application in our
field of large-scale data processing and was the first instance of
using, assembling and storing programming on disk arrays. Another
watershed event was the development of the use of 24p. We recognized at
the end of 1997, when the FCC made its announcement of the ATSC, the
ramifications for our customers and came up with a way to work in 24p
using existing equipment. We had it pretty well sorted [and] went to
Sony and described the system we’d planned out and what the market was.
They developed the technology of 24p, then we went to Philips and 10
other manufacturers who made the commitment, and we worked with them to
bring 24p mastering of film-originated content into existence.
F&V: Does the acquisition in any way reflect how expensive it is to be a pioneering facility doing leading-edge engineering?
Cohen: All of those developments that I mentioned were, of course, done
when the company was an independent facility. In fact it was Kodak that
approached us because of its interest in broadening its horizons and to
expand its presence into the service part of the industry. We weren’t
going out and looking for a deep-pocket parent. It is better to be rich
than poor, and the alliance with a company of the scope of
Eastman-Kodak- in terms of financial and intellectual resources- will
only help us in doing more and doing it more quickly…. We’re not
looking to tap into treasure for our survival. However, there is no
question that the industry has seen, and continues to see,
consolidation, and there is no question that most of our competitors
now have parent companies with far greater resources than Laser-Pacific
as an independent. It may be, in the future, mandatory to be part of a
larger entity.
F&V: What is the time frame for the development of technology that
can practically handle high bandwidth and capture dynamic range better
than any film can today, so that the director could effectively, after
the fact, choose to emulate any film stock at any speed?