Wouldn’t it’s nice if you happen to may ship high-resolution dailies to your total crew inside minutes of the director yelling “minimize”?
That’s precisely what the staff at LumaForge has achieved with their cutting-edge 8K dailies workflow.
After LumaForge despatched us the video, we merely couldn’t move up the chance to search out out extra. So we sat down with lead editor and producer, Patrick Southern, to deliver you the within scoop on how they developed this spectacular workflow.
As is usually the case with improvements like this, the workflow was born out of necessity. Patrick and his staff are at the moment engaged on the indie function movie, Faith Based, a comedy by filmmaking duo Vincent Masciale and Luke Barnett.
Religion Based mostly follows two sophomoric pals who try to make “buckets of money” by producing a pretend Christian movie. This satirical tackle the film trade is harking back to Mel Brooks’ hilarious Broadway sendup in The Producers, and goals to make a giant splash within the competition circuit this fall.
Given the movie’s fast-approaching debut, saving time has been a key think about manufacturing planning from the very starting. However as an indie movie, the finances couldn’t accommodate the higher-cost options you may see on a bigger manufacturing with a good turnaround.
As a result of there was no time (or finances) for reshoots, it was important for them to make sure that what they have been capturing labored earlier than they left the set. That’s why Patrick and his staff determined to go all-in and construct their very own dailies workflow from scratch.
“Historically, a DIT or publish home is employed to create dailies. On Religion Based mostly, we had neither, and with the digicam techniques we have been utilizing, we knew our earlier workflows wouldn’t be sufficient,” Patrick stated.
They shot on a pair of 8K RED Helium cameras, and there aren’t any obtainable off-the-shelf options to dealing with the large dimension of the footage, whereas additionally being quick and light-weight sufficient to run on the cellular computer systems the staff is utilizing. “Our modifying staff needed to get scrappy, so we constructed our personal answer,” Patrick says.
“We needed to begin with a storage answer that was sufficiently big, but additionally had the efficiency to deal with the large bitrate. Fortunately, we already made one.”
The staff dumped digicam playing cards to a Jellyfish Mobile modifying server, whereas additionally backing up all the things to a RAID. At first look, transferring footage may look like a easy drag-and-drop operation, however there are a selection of technical points that may come up in the course of the course of. Information could be mislabeled, misplaced, and even corrupted, which isn’t appropriate with a good turnaround.
“We used an app known as Hedge for file transfers. It allowed us to simply copy knowledge from the digicam playing cards to a number of locations suddenly. And since we have been capturing RED, we have been capable of document proxy media recordsdata in digicam. This actually was the important thing to pulling off the entire deal. We didn’t must do any transcoding, which saved us a ton of time.”
The staff used Kyno to instantly import the proxies into Remaining Minimize Professional X. This meant that full-resolution 8K video recordsdata have been prepared for modifying minutes after a card was pulled from a digicam. And since these have been proxy recordsdata, they could possibly be considered on the laptops they have been utilizing on set.
“In fact, we have been recording exterior audio, so we additionally wanted a approach to shortly sync the proxies to the sound. For that, we used Sync-N-Link X, which made the syncing course of fairly painless,” Patrick stated.
After all the things was synced, the editorial staff began the method of delivering dailies to the director and manufacturing crew. They batch exported the synchronized clips from Remaining Minimize Professional X to a Frame.io Watch Folder, which mechanically synced all of the recordsdata into the cloud.
As we’ve famous, 8K recordsdata are monumental. As a way to maximize the variety of recordsdata they might hold within the cloud directly, Patrick’s staff created a customized export preset in Compressor that diminished the decision and knowledge fee of the recordsdata. This allowed them to maintain extra recordsdata obtainable for overview for an extended time with out ballooning the quantity of essential cloud storage.
“We actually received lots of use out of the Body.io macOS app,” Patrick stated. “We configured the Watch Folders to prepare recordsdata into folders primarily based on capturing day. It stored all the things neat and orderly, and helped the manufacturing crew keep oriented when making an attempt to recollect what scenes have been shot when. And, as all the time, the uploads have been quick. Body.io’s velocity is fairly exceptional.”
As soon as recordsdata made their approach to Body.io, the director was capable of watch dailies on his iPhone from anyplace, at any time, so long as he had a connection.
But it surely was the power to overview dailies on set that basically proved the worth of this new workflow.
“Religion Based mostly depends closely on actors improvising, so ensuring their performances match and ship on the humor is vital. That makes this type of speedy overview invaluable.”
Patrick says the director, cinematographer, and even actors appreciated the velocity and high quality at which dailies have been delivered.
“We made wardrobe selections primarily based on dailies. Jokes and scenes have been re-written primarily based on performances. We may instantly see what was captured on set, with synchronized audio, which was an enormous assist to the complete artistic course of, not simply editorial.”
Patrick says they discovered a number of cool workflow ideas and tips from this mission, however the dailies had the largest impression, by far.
“It’s nice to see {that a} custom primarily based on movie has taken on a brand new life with digital video manufacturing,” Patrick says. “With movie, you used to ship off the unfavorable to get developed, and hopefully the following day you’d have the footage to observe again on a giant ol’ projector in a single room, with everybody who wanted to see it crammed in there. However as of late, anybody can watch dailies from a laptop computer, pill, or telephone from mainly anyplace. It’s actually thrilling.”
Now that LumaForge has confirmed and refined this workflow, it needs to be comparatively simple for different productions to undertake this technique. In fact, you don’t have to be capturing on ultra-high-end 8K cameras so as to add these technical and artistic tips to your manufacturing, however it’s good to know that these instruments can be found.
Are there any workflow tips you’ve found? Tell us within the feedback.
