Sundance Film Festival

Today at the New Frontier center at 333 Main St., entertainment technology strategy adviser Phil Lelyveld (formerly with Disney) moderated a panel with five very different filmmakers. Mark Randall, now of Adobe, is probably best known to our readers as the creator of Serious Magic DV Rack on-set monitoring software (now owned by Adobe, renamed OnLocation & bundled with many Adobe CS3 packages).

He’s also an independent filmmaker–he says that he created DV Rack for himself as a way to avoid renting an expensive 35lb. CRT monitor for shoots. Randall described a preproduction workflow on a recent project that sounds just as innovative as any Serious Magic software program. Essentially, he gets all the principal actors together, some of the crew, and goes through the script as a dry run with DV cameras. The lighting might be terrible, there might be stand-ins for some of the actors, but the goal is to get the pacing down. The DP can play with camera angles to help firm up the final shot list. “I’ve seen it build team sync,” Randall adds.

Alex Buono wrote and served as DP for a film that’s got possibly the strongest kiosk presence at this year’s festival: Bigger, Stronger, Faster, about the use of steroids and other performance enhancements in sports. For this production his team bought a Panasonic HVX200 when it was a brand-new, unproven camera and its 8GB cards cost $1,200 each. (At the time he didn’t like how HDV footage was looking, nor did its editorial process look promising to him.) He listed all the benefits of solid-state acquisition that would be familiar to those who have been following the technology as it matures. (Of course, as a technology journalist, I often forget that many working filmmakers are too busy doing their own projects to follow the tech beat.)

For Bigger, Stronger, Faster, Buono and his team were shooting 720p24 and shuffling four 8GB cards in and out of the HVX200 and keeping footage backed up on hard drives, which were ready to feed Avid Unity storage the minute they hit the edit suite for the Xpress Pro offline. Buono says with that over hundreds of hours footage across about 16TB, the production team never lost any footage. (One backed-up drive did fail.)

For the online, BSF was cut on Final Cut at Mind Over Eye in Santa Monica. This transfer, which involved a proprietary EDL/AAF/OMF to XML workflow, presented very few problems, according to Buono. More challenging was incorporating 24 different formats of archival shots into the rest of the footage, as each type of clip was treated individually in terms of scaling, pan-and-scan, etc.

In the end, BSF was color-corrected in Apple’s new Color module, which was used to produce two different final masters: one for broadcast (completed by Mind Over Eye) and one for projection (completed by Buono’s team). Certainly no production has involved the workflow of Bigger, Stronger, Faster — but it’s destined to seem less exotic as time passes.