PostWorks Kept All the Footage on the SAN, all the time

Building out storage and rendering power for Hollywood projects at a new facility in Santa Monica, PostWorks executives think they see the future of the high-end television pipeline – and it looks a lot like a feature-film DI workflow. The proof of concept is its recent implementation of a datacentric, largely tapeless workflow for the five-nights-a-week HBO series, In Treatment.
PostWorks is well known in New York City as a hub for post-production and DI work, but the imminent opening of two new locations in Los Angeles – the facility in Santa Monica for “front-end” services like picture conform and color-correction, and another in Santa Clarita for film scanning, recording, and data storage – is a bid for a higher Hollywood profile. As the company ramps up operations in L.A., PostWorks hopes to leverage its status as a West Coast newcomer to give it an advantage in an increasingly tapeless market.

Starting From Scratch

“It all starts with a philosophy,” avers Senior VP Marco Bario. “We’re building something from scratch, and no one’s done that for some time in the L.A. market. And because this big transition is happening, it’s smarter for us to build for where [the market] is going, rather than where it is today. Ultimately, we’ll see lots and lots of storage here, and not too many videotape machines. It’s basically the DI workflow. You can think of it as a DI workflow that would apply to broadcast and studio mastering.”

PostWorks got the chance to prove its point when it landed a high-profile job for HBO, managing conform and color-correction for a demanding series. In Treatment, a show starring Gabriel Byrne as a psychotherapist, consists of 43 half-hour episodes that aired consecutively on weeknights beginning in January. Imagine the versioning requirements alone – two-minute cutdowns, previously ons, a variety of promos – and you can see why HBO found an all-data workflow immediately attractive.

Digital Workflow

Here’s a rundown of the pipeline: To date, PostWorks Los Angeles has installed 100 TB of SAN storage, an Autodesk Smoke suite for picture conform, and an Autodesk Lustre suite for color-correction. The camera originals for In Treatment were already compressed, since they were recorded to HDCAM tape, but once the tapes were ingested at PostWorks, every frame remained available, uncompressed, as data, on the SAN, where both rooms could access the footage without making any baked-in changes until the creation of deliverables.

The first 10 episodes were conformed at another facility, so PostWorks digitized them from tape for color-correction and mastering. The rest of the series went tapeless. “The show was completely shot by the time it got to us,” explains VP of Broadcast Services Jennifer Tellefsen. “We would get a list [of selects] from their editor, and we would ingest their tapes based on that. From that point, we stayed data throughout. We conformed, and then we moved it over to color-correction, and only went out to tape for deliverables.”

Making It in Metadata

The ability of the Autodesk products to work together, sharing metadata without having any color-correction or conforming decisions baked into the source files, is critical to the system. “That back-and-forth can happen a lot during the process,” says Bario. “As picture changes happen, our colorist – who was Pankaj Bajpai on this show – can be in the back end of the reel while editorial changes are happening on the front end. And if he goes back to the front end, he can see those changes.”

The workflow had twin advantages when it came to the show’s multiplicity of deliverables. First, it preserved quality thoughout the process, as there was no need to go out to tape again and again to create masters and submasters. Second, it dramatically increased efficiency. “We kind of flattened our workflow so we could work on these different versions at the same time, meeting the clients’ needs as we went along,” notes Tellefsen. “It also allowed us to do color and conform and titling at the same time, so we are flattening that whole process, too.”

Having all the data on the SAN can be a boon for colorists, as well. “When we’re building the previously-ons and Pankaj wants to look at his color-correction from previous episodes, it’s immediately available,” Bario says. “Or if he’s in an episode that’s two weeks downstream, he can always check: What was the look in the office the last time this patient came in? It’s better than a still store. It’s got every color-correction decision he made, plus the source data, instantly available.”

Speed Demons

Speaking of color-correction, PostWorks amped up its Lustre system, boosting speed with a 16-node Incinerator system that accelerates performance to real time. “There’s Lustre, and then there’s Lustre with this many render nodes on it,” Bario says. “The Incinerators are background render processors that the colorists can allocate while they’re working. We can do a huge number of windows and defocus layers and things like that, and the interaction while you’re in the room with the client is real time, versus a smaller build-out using similar technology, where all of a sudden you’re playing back at 12 frames per second. It’s really hard to work that way with a client in the room.”

“Actually, when we render episodes out in the end, it’s faster than real time,” Tellefsen says. “People were worried about that at first, because it used to take so long to render. But we can render a half-hour show in about 15 minutes.”

For TV shows acquired on film, the whole process would be very similar – instead of using a telecine to transfer reels to HDCAM SR tape, PostWorks would scan film directly to data, uncompressed, just as it would for a feature film DI.

One Size Fits All

It makes sense that a datacentric post process would apply equally well to different industry segments once physical formats like tape and film are removed from the equation, but it does take time to reform long-standing practices that have become second nature in some industry segments. For instance, Bario cites the prevalence in the broadcast market of videotape deliveries from VFX houses.

“It has been typical in broadcast to deliver VFX on tape, and that doesn’t really lend itself to this process,” he says. “In features, everyone delivers data on a FireWire drive. That cultural shift happened a number of years ago as DI took off. It’s pointless to put the VFX on videotape if we’re going to bring them in as data, so we’ve started getting FireWire drives on some of these shows – and that’s kind of cool.”

PostWorks will push that transition to a consistent, tapeless workflow for both TV and feature-film work when it officially opens for business in L.A. over the next fewmonths. The Santa Clarita facility is expected to open in April, with Santa Monica following in June; in the not-too-distant future, the Santa Clarita location is expected to have a petabyte of storage online.