Filmmaker Workflow - Overview
If you are a filmmaker or involved in the filmmaking
process, your project will likely gain cost and workflow
benefits by using CineForm Intermediate. This page is
designed to assist you in designing an efficient workflow from
the beginning of your production, and how to choose the proper
CineForm product based on your production needs.
We have designed our products to
assist filmmakers from the initial production shoot, through
acquisition and post-production, and of course with support for
various film, video, or electronic presentation formats.
Prospect HD and Prospect 2K have been used successfully on many theatrical
release film productions, including "Dust to Glory", "Santa's
Polar Blast", and "LBS" ("Pounds"). Many other projects
are currently underway.
Film or HD Workflow....
If your project is shot on film or HD, you'll want to use our
10-bit real-time workflow available through
Prospect HD and
Prospect 2K. Using Prospect HD/2K you can:
- Scan or telecine directly into
10-bit CineForm Intermediate from either film or HD source
- Lower equipment costs by
eliminating specialized hardware and proprietary software
- Reduce editing labor costs
because our real-time workflow eliminates most need for
rendering while editing
- Use an always-online 10-bit
workflow which:
- eliminates proxy editing and conforming
- allows color timing and effects work to be performed at any time during the project
workflow
- allows HD projection at festivals
- Export your completed editing
timeline directly to various mastering formats for film
recording or electronic projection
- Assemble a turnkey HW/SW
system for about $10,000 including 20 hours of HD storage
Please read the
Film/HD Workflow Considerations
below for a detailed workflow discussion about using Prospect HD
and Prospect 2K.
HDV Workflow....
If your project is shot in HDV, you have a couple options to
consider. If your project will benefit from a 10-bit
post-production workflow, you should you use Prospect HD.
To make this determination, consider whether you have
substantial color correction, compositing, or green screen work
to perform in post. If so, carrying the extra precision of
a 10-bit workflow throughout post may add additional visual
quality that will benefit your project. If there is a
chance your production may be transferred to film, you may also
benefit from the 10-bit workflow of Prospect HD. If these
situations apply to you, please read the
Film/HD Workflow Considerations
below.
If you prefer to use an 8-bit
workflow for your HDV project, you're in great shape using
Aspect HD with Adobe Premiere Pro
or Connect HD with Sony Vegas.
Our CineForm Intermediate codec technology is identical in both
products, and will preserve the visual quality of your source
material in a manner indistinguishable from using an
uncompressed 8-bit workflow. This is underscored by
considering that both products have completed scores of
Professional projects, including for broadcast television and
theatrical presentation. You will still benefit from
reading the Film/HD Workflow
Considerations below because the same principles apply to a
film workflow from HDV source.
If you have any questions about our
products or how our workflow can benefit your film project, please don't hesitate to
send us an email. |
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CineForm
Intermediate offers multiple options as you plan your workflow:
Film Acquisition: If your
project is shot on film, you can decide whether you prefer to
employ our 10-bit Prospect 2K workflow supporting frame resolutions up
to 2048 x 1556 (full aperture) or whether you prefer to telecine
your material into full-raster 10-bit 1920 x 1080 HD. CineForm is
working with our partner
Pixel
Harvest who is currently performing both 2K data scans and
HD telecine scans directly into CineForm Intermediate.
We've worked closely with Pixel Harvest to optimize the scanning
workflow, developed for and used successfully on the
LBS (i.e., "Pounds") film by
Cavu Pictures. Data scans for LBS were performed as
10-bit log data at frame sizes of 2048 x 1276. From the
Pixel
Harvest website you can get a quote for scanning your
film directly into 10-bit CineForm Intermediate for as little as 3¢
per frame. Scanning your film from cut-negative
directly into CineForm Intermediate usually runs about
$5000.
Dust to Glory used many
different source formats including 35mm and 16mm film, HDCam, 16:9 DV,
and 4:3 DV. All material was ultimately converted into
10-bit HD CineForm Intermediate files at
Laser
Pacific in Hollywood where the post-production work was
performed:
- 35mm film was scanned into
uncompressed files and later converted into CineForm
Intermediate HD files
- 16mm film was telecined directly
into CineForm Intermediate using HD-SDI Ingest on a Prospect
HD workstation
- DV was deinterlaced (4:3)
and up-converted to HD for conversion into CineForm
Intermediate.
As you can see, the Dust to Glory
project pushed all of us involved in the project to perfect
different Ingest methods.
HD
Acquisition: If your project is shot in HD, there are
a few options for consideration:
- If you capture using the
camera's native tape format (HDCam, DVCPro, etc) you can
simply play the material out from the camera (or a deck)
over HD-SDI directly into a Prospect HD workstation which
will ingest the material and convert it to 1920 x 1080 4:2:2
10-bit CineForm Intermediate files in real time.
- An alternative is to record
directly into CineForm Intermediate on-location. The
advantage to this technique is that your capture will be
full-raster 1920 x 1080 10-bit. Native capture formats
vary, but HDCam is recorded on tape at luma
resolution of 1440x1080 using a 3:1:1 chroma format (480
chroma pixels per line) and with 8 bits of precision.
Capturing natively into CineForm Intermediate will provide
higher visual fidelity. This technique requires a
Prospect HD workstation on-site for the capture, plus the
necessary run of an HD-SDI cable to the camera head.
-
CineForm and Wafian Corporation recently announced a
marketing and technology partnership centered around the new
Wafian HR-1 direct-to-disk recorder. Targeting on-set
and on-location production acquisition, the HR-1 can record
up to 18 hours of 10-bit CineForm Intermediate files through
the HR-1's HD-SDI interface. After recording,
post-production workflow efficiency is extraordinary.
The HR-1 completely eliminates the time-consuming and
expensive "ingest" process required with tape-based capture.
Files may be easily moved from the HR-1 over the network to
archive servers, editing/compositing workstations, or to
Firewire drives for portability. Because CineForm
Intermediate files are optimized for post-production
performance, material is immediately available for real-time
editing using CineForm's Prospect HD with Adobe Premiere Pro
plus effects/compositing work with Adobe After Effects.
Read more about the Wafian HR-1
For HDV, similar to HDCam,
you can choose to capture on tape and later convert to
CineForm Intermediate while ingesting over Firewire.
Prospect HD will optionally up-convert HDV to 1920x1080 YUV
4:2:2 at 10-bits, offering higher post-production fidelity.
Full-raster 1920 horizontal resolution is also beneficial
when blending footage from other sources, or when HD-SDI
monitoring is desired. Also, some HDV cameras offer component HD outputs that
bypass the MPEG compression stage, and can be fed into a
Prospect HD workstation for native on-location compression into CineForm
Intermediate.
The new Canon XL H1 camcorder is rumored
to have an HD-SDI output which could also be fed directly
into a Prospect HD workstation.
- Some Technical
Notes About Compression
Ratios: CineForm Intermediate employs a variable-bitrate
temporal Wavelet algorithm designed for optimum visual quality and
arithmetic performance. Resulting bitrates vary based
on scene complexity, but a rule of thumb is that most
material will compress approximately 5:1 to 10:1 compared to
the same material in uncompressed form. For example,
material telecined into CineForm Intermediate for the Dust to
Glory project averaged a compression ratio of about 8:1 –
about 15MB/sec. Each hour of material is about 50GB in disk
size. This data rate is low enough that ingest can be
sustained on a single 7200 rpm IDE drive. On the LBS
project which used 2K data scans, the compression ratio
averaged about 7:1. As a comparison, if you are to
consider ingesting uncompressed HD, you'll need a
minimum of a 4-drive RAID subsystem with 8 times
as many drives, and the resulting visual quality will be
indistinguishable from that of CineForm Intermediate.
Post Production:
Prospect HD and Prospect 2K are our products that offer a 10-bit
real-time post-production workflow within Adobe Premiere Pro.
We won't spend a lot of space in this section talking about
specific editing features and performance - you can read more
detail about this on our Prospect HD
product page. Aspect HD and
Connect HD offer an 8-bit workflow
with horizontal resolutions up to 1440 pixels. Aside from
its 8-bit I/O precision and lack of HD-SDI support, the workflow
of Aspect HD is virtually otherwise identical to that of
Prospect HD. Check our product pages for additional
product details.
When using CineForm products for
your film project, consider the following from a
workflow perspective:
- The online format of
CineForm Intermediate eliminates the proxy workflow and
conforming.
- Because you're always
working with online material, even for rough-cut editing,
you can begin color timing and compositing work at the
beginning of a project rather than forcing it to the end
- Even your rough-cut material
can always be viewed at full-res HD or 2K, including at film
festivals
- CineForm Intermediate files
are interoperable with scores of Windows applications,
including Sony Vegas, Combustion, Lightwave, and others
- 10-bit secondary color
correction can be performed within Premiere Pro using the
Color
Finesse plug-in by Synthetic Aperture. Dust to
Glory used Color Finesse within AE; it was after the
completion of Dust to Glory that we finished integration
work with Synthetic Aperture to allow 10-bit color
correction directly within Premiere Pro.
And consider the following from a
cost perspective: A fully-configured Prospect HD workstation
including 20 hours of HD storage (about 1TB) can be purchased
for about $10K - a little more or a little less depending on
system configuration. No other manufacturer comes
even close to offering the price/performance of a Prospect HD/2K
editing system. And the real-time workflow efficiency will
save scores of hours of post-production time. The
producers of Dust to
Glory saved well over $100,000 on their post workflow compared
to cumbersome traditional methods. An Aspect HD
workstation suitable for film post-production can be assembled,
including hardware and software, for about $2500.
Mastering Outputs:
Prospect HD, Aspect HD, and Premiere Pro work together to provide various
outputs depending on your presentation needs:
- HD-SDI output (Prospect HD) is provided
for those that need to output to a broadcast environment or
to a mastering tape format such as D5.
- For film recording, output
to DPX files can be done through After Effects.
- For electronic presentation,
output to WMV or other compressed file formats is done
directly from the Premiere Pro timeline.
Film Recording: As we are with
film scanning and telecine for Ingest, we are working with
Pixel
Harvest to support film recording directly from CineForm
Intermediate files. As a figure of merit, 35mm film output
from a CineForm Intermediate file will cost in the neighborhood
of $10,000 including film stock. If you have any
lingering questions
about our products or workflow, or how our products might
best be used in your project, please don't hesitate to
send us an email.
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