COLORSPACE

COLORSPACE DIGITAL CINEMA WORKFLOW

The promise of digital cinema is lowered cost, and more creative control -- and with the right workflow, you can indeed have both of those. If we look at a very simplistic layout of a traditional film workflow (click image on the left),

it's immediately apparent that the film processing lab act as the bottleneck in the flow and dissemination of footage. Film must be couriered from shoot locations to the lab, developed, and then telecined. The telecined dailies must then be couriered back to the shoot location (or wherever the screening room is), while subsequent copies are likely sent off to the studio and other parties. The use of couriers and a centralized but geographically seperated chokepoint (the lab) increases cost and the time to viewing.

If we look at a simplistic overview of an idealized digital workflow, a couple of things become apparent. Digital recording, to a device such as the ICON, shifts the centralized point of control from the lab, to the actual production set (although technically this point could be shifted to any location, but generally the set makes the most sense). The recorder media suddenly becomes the gatekey.

No couriers, no developing, no scanning, no waiting. Sound sync dailies can be viewed as soon as desired, directly from the recorder. Master data tape copies can be made immediately --even DURING recording, by tethering an HD-SDI tape recorder (such as the SRW1) to the ICON, if one desires video tape master. Proxy files can be generated immediately after recording. Everything that used to require couriers and lots of time, can happen on-site, and immediately. Of course bonded master copies will still need to be shipped off-site, but that's a secondary process that isn't going to slow the dissemination of footage. Minutes after shooting wraps, proxies or even raw footage can be uploaded via high speed encrypted link to the studio, post-production houses, or to centralized servers.