Director
Ron Howard
Views Dailies for 'Ed TV'
on CD-ROM
For the better part of the last century, filmmakers viewed dailies in a room on a large projection screen. With the acceptance of video, they began watching dailies on television monitors, reducing their dependence on the fixed screening room. During the production of Ed TV, opening March 26, director Ron Howard liberated himself from a reliance on video screening rooms, as well: He viewed digital dailies on a laptop computer.
A new service provided by DES (Digital Editing Solutions), which has offices in North Hollywood and New York, digital dailies add a higher degree of flexibility to the creative process. For principal photography of Ed TV, produced by Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment, DES delivered dailies on CD-ROM to Howard right on the set. He was then able to watch them on an Apple Powerbook 3400 at his convenience.
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"The great feature of working on a laptop is that it allows me to do more with one incredible tool," says the director. "The same tool I use to get email, I use to see dailies. I can skip around within scenes and the picture quality is high, equivalent to what I see off the video tap."
The digital dailies process is straightforward. Colorists and engineers at DES's Imaging Center receive film dailies from the cutting room. This material is transferred simultaneously to Avid Media format for editing, to Betacam SP for backup, and to an MPEG compression station for burning onto CD-ROM. Imagine Entertainment is the first company to take advantage of this new service, with DES also fulfilling other digital post-production requirements for Ed TV, including integrating Avid Film Composer systems and fibre-channel shared storage.
"DES provides technology which allows me to expand my capacities," Howard says. "I can accomplish more in shorter periods of time and utilize every spare 15 minutes - and I learned everything I needed to know about the technology in 10."
"Our experience on big projects such as Titanic and Armageddon has pushed us to innovative solutions for these unique filmmakers," concludes DES vice president Patrick Ready. "Because of all these new tools, we can think progressively about improving the creative process. By intelligently applying technology to the current standards of filmmaking, we can open up new efficiencies for our clients."
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 20, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 1999
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