WELCOME | High Definition magazine

Here at Pinewood Studios, at the heart of the British Film Industry, Rogue Element Films have been pioneering new and efficient ways of developing workflows for our ‘Digital Cinematography’ film shoots. Over the last five or so years we have seen digital film slowly maturing into the state of play we now witness and have gained a broader understanding of how such photography should be tackled, that is, by starting with a workflow that suits your shooting scheme.

With the strong emergence of the RED system we can clearly see how important workflows are to these cameras. At this stage in time, the RED workflow is immature and is evolving through being beta tested by its many owners. This highlights how productions that are shooting digital feature films now have developed into much more mature systems. We aim to demonstrate that here with this article.

We firmly believe that the cornerstone of practically all high-end digital shoots is the workflow that you employ to not only capture the images (the easy bit) but how to develop an efficient offline/online environment to minimise the impact of controlling such huge amounts of data.

By explaining our approach to recent back to back feature films and commercial shoots we will explain developing workflows and how far they have matured in even the last year or so. Don’t forget it wasn’t so long ago that a lot of productions were confused as to the speed of disk systems required to play full HD images without dropping frames, information that is now part of everyone’s language and understanding.

The workflows adopted here are fairly universal and can be used for most shoots but we will concentrate on a fully uncompressed 2K/HD data workflow, as used by David Fincher on his new Brad Pitt movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, and now utilised by us and others. This style of capture is significantly high-end, due to the amount of information being captured and offlined, but it is a workflow that allows real-time playout and playback of the raw material. It also has the ability to maximise efficiency on the actual set itself with smart and quick workflow ideas. Being a real-time process the need for rendering the captured material is not there as no software wrappers are employed to store the material, making efficiency on-set that much more effective.

To illustrate, we’ve provided a definitive list of the equipment (above) used on all these recent shoots, what was used and why.

It’s important to list the equipment used to fully explain how these workflows were arrived at. Most productions could easily employ other manufacturer’s similar products but the exercise here is the workflow and the reasons for it.

The reason for using the Stwo DFR system is it’s ability to capture, completely uncompressed, 2K/HD data from the Viper Filmstream Camera and save production metadata into each DPX frame.

This is saved on the DMAGs (digital magazines that, like film mags, hold the negative) as DPX frames, 24 individual frames per second and all easily accessible. So what we have on each DMAG when full is over 33,000 individual DPX film frames, the digital negative.

This is enhanced by the Viper’s ability to record raw image data with all camera correction settings switched off, allowing post to apply corrections to the raw data the way you want it to and not the way the camera would do this. Not all digital cameras available in the market do this, they still apply small amounts of correction to the image giving you less control over the image correction and grading process once in post.

Firstly set the camera up to record at full 4:4:4 colour space for eventual film print or DCI delivery at 1080 24p 4:4:4 2.37:1 Anamorphic (the Viper can crop to 2.37:1 but keep full 1080 lines of resolution).

Set the Stwo recorder up to receive the same signal so the Stwo is set to 4:4:4 1080 24p, the 2.37:1 image is recorded 16:9 full frame unsqueezed to the DMAGs. Once you can see a live image, then you are set and ready to film.