COLORSPACE

COLORSPACE DIGITAL DAILIES

At Colorspace, we strive to design products that are adaptable and modular. What this means, is that although the ICON was designed to primarily be used as a digital cinema recorder, it also works perfectly as a dailies box. Whether you're using the ICON for recording original camera uncompresed digital negative, or you're following a standard tape workflow, the ICON is a natural choice for dailies.

TAPE WORKFLOW

The Problem: If you're following a normal tape workflow.. say you're using an F23 or a Viper, coupled to a Sony SRW1 recorder. The HDCAMSR tape is your master (original camera digital negative). Tape makes a great master because difficult to damage accidentally. Unfortunately, it also makes a poor recording media with respect to dailies workflow. Your images are trapped in that HDCAM tape, and you need to get certain takes extracted, arranged in order, and then screened for dailies. Normally that would mean a lot of capturing, parsing out the circle takes, perhaps syncing external sound, and then laying back to some other media for screening. Assuming you're laying back to tape (D5, HDCAM, etc) for screening, you're going to be locked into the take/scene order the video files are laid back down in. If you put some throwaway takes at the end of the tape, and you want to see one of those, you're going to have to jog through the tape to view, then back to where you left off. Even if everything is perfectly ordered, you're still going to have to courier the tape to be captured (unless done on set), and someone is going to manually have to capture it, parse the files, lay back to a second tape, and then send that to be screened.

The Solution: It's not that tape mastering creates too much of a dailies problem, it's just inconvenient. With the ICON tethered to your tape recorder (or vice-versa), you'll have an immediate uncompressed "data" master of your original camera digital negative. By marking one of the ICON's three assignable hard buttons to flag the most recent take as meta-data, you can create an automatic playlist without doing anything more than pushing a single button everything the director says, "that was perfect." With dual XLR inputs, the sound department can run 4 channels of audio to the ICON for automated sound sync. By assigning another of the three hard buttons to shot review, if the director wants to see the take played back on the monitor, whether he wants this a tenth of a second after the take, or ten minutes after, a press of one button will play back the entire take plus an automated slate at the header and footer (which will show, among other things, if it's marked circle take). When the day's shooting is done, your video tape master can go off to post-production, and the ICON is ready to screen dailies immediately. With the ICON, you don't wait for dailies, dailies wait for you. With the entire contents of the media pack browsable through the ICON's "file management" interface (accessed through a 7" touchscreen), a manual playlist can be built. Additionally, during screening, if you want to see a file that isn't on the playlist, you can bring it up in seconds using the file management interface. With the software proxy support in the ICON (which is currently in development, expected late 2008 or early 2009), proxy dailies can be generated too. The director can screen uncompressed (100% quality) dailies, but compressed dailies can also be generated and downloaded off the media pack or via one of the data interfaces (fiber, ethernet, usb). These dailies can be burned to DVD and couriered to studio executives or anyone else who may need to access them, or simply uploaded via an encrypted link to a remote server (where authorized individuals can access them).

DFR WORKFLOW

The Problem: Digital field recorders are great because most of the [high end cinema-targeted ones] offer you uncompressed recording. But, while you can record uncompressed, assured that all of your footage is of utmost fidelity, you've heard horror stories of "drive failure" or "accidental erasure." Even if you haven't heard these horror stories, you're still probably wary of the idea of transporting a 100lb box to the screening room; compared to "handing someone a tape," this seems like a pretty extreme excercise.

The Solution: Fortunately, the ICON has arrived. Its modular metal construction means that it can take a pretty severe drop and continue to be used, unbroken. Even in a really several drop, because it's metal, it the panels will bend and crack, but not shatter like plastic. The damaged panel can be individually replaced, or in a pinch even welded! But what about the footage inside?! Well, the ICON's internal storage is RAID protected solid state media. The flash media is rated beyond 500G's of shock-- most car crashes do not rate higher than 70G's, and even falling 180ft from the Golden Gate Bridge into the water will only rate 200G's of impact. In short, if you're subjecting your media packs to 500+G shocks, you have bigger problems potential footage loss. Furthermore, because of the RAID protection, any one of the arrays inside can fail completely (each array is rated for 2million hours of use before failure), and the footage will be completely protected. What about accidental erasure? Well, although we do offer a touchscreen "delete" button, it has to be manually enabled in the preferences dialogue, and includes a second "are you sure?" prompt for each time it's pressed. Even then, we offer an "undelete" button. Until you've turned on the delete button manually, selected the files to erase, pressed delete, confirmed you are sure, and then recorded over them, the files haven't been erased. With such a deliberate combination of events, it's difficult to imagine erasure happening accidentally. Lastly, because filmmakers are accustomed to the idea of handing off tapes and film mags, we've tried to design the ICON to emulate this paradigm. The ICON itself is under 10lbs, including media pack. The pack itself is just a couple of pounds. Whether you're going to transport the entire ICON and media pack to the screening room, or just handoff the media pack, you'll find the experience much simpler than toting around the average 100lb DFR.