Telecine

[Alex Boothby]

Boothba: may I ask what you do at the company?

The Quantel guide (although heavily focussed on their products) has some diagrams for digital acquisition. Basically it's the same as film. Big SAN solution with high throughput (fiber) networks. Depending on how much data is traveling around (ie, how many projects are worked on at the same time) you want to segment your network or have multiple networks.

http://www.quantel.com/site/en.nsf/html/library_diguide

Hi Rob. I'm an Inferno artist and commercial fx supervisor at Technicolor in Toronto, although I'm not very tech savvy and have only recently begun to re-educate myself about the new possibilities of extreme data-workflows. To be honest I've been stuck in a sort of tech-bubble for a few years as we have a good engineering staff who keep us crazy artists at arm's length from technical side of things (no super-user status for me!). But I'm very excited about the new possibilities of data and ultimately hope to set up a good home system as my RED base, so that I am not so reliant on the good graces of my bosses.

Funny you mentioned Quantel as I was a Quantel operator on Henry, Hal and Domino for about 8 years, but turned to discreet at around the time IQ was beta testing. I'll definitely have a look at that article.

Cheers.
Alex Boothby

 

[Thomas Mathai]

Oh realtime 2K playback is no problem once the footage is in the Lustre system. The problem was moving the DPX files from point A of our company network to point B. Our film scanners and recorders are on one floor, vfx on another, discreet on another, etc. My point is that anything less than realtime is unusual for an SD/HD telecine, which is basically what we were using Lustre for at the time. We have another Lustre dedicated to feature work which is more isolated and is rockin' & rollin' - booked solid.

This week they just installed a new 2K/4K Spirit which has a high speed GSN (Gigabyte Systems Network) optical data output which should be considerably faster. It just arrived, so I'll have to look into that option more closely. Spirit is now happily trumpetting their ability to scan 8-perf VistaVision, so something tells me their head is not yet totally immersed in pure data-acquisition. Maybe they should walk accross the hall and talk to the Viper boys to figure out some streamlined data-grading strategies.

My currenty question is where do you ingest, if your source is data not neg or tape? How much and how fast? I'll have to do some digging here.

NOTE: I'm not a colorist so aside from water cooler chit-chat, I'm not extremely telecine-ely...ely well informed. And frankly, right now 99% of our clients shoot on film or tape (or P2 stuff which is dumped to tape) so I don't know how much R&D has been put into data-specs the likes of RED. Aside from the odd IMAX job (which is scanned in LA and delivered of DLT) nothing really comes close.

Well firewire performance really depends on the client's handling of the their drives. Some will always be wanky, while others are rock solid.

It can take hours to transfer a few hundred gigs, even using Firewire 800.

Moving files from point A to B shouldn't be as big an issue as it seems, assuming there is enough bandwidth on the network. Of course it's not going to be realtiime with 2k DPX files, but in the future it can be faster than realtime.

 

[Rob Lohman]

Thanks Alex!