Sound the DRUMS!

Locations '97 Shows
You a Way to Stay Home

by Liza McDonald

When I walked into "Locations '97" at the Los Angeles Convention Center, my natural wanderlust kicked right in. Spread out before me - aisle after aisle - were travel agencies - excuse me - Film Commissio ns - hawking their "wheres". Happily, I entered the maze. The promise of adventure was at once BOLD: "Missouri-Your 69,674 Square Mile Back Lot"; SEDUCTIVE: "Virginia -Any Time, Any Place"; SHY: "Venezuela-It's worth trying!"; and PRACTICAL: "Kentucky-Tax Rebate." I traversed one cheerful row after another, after another, after another...collecting photographs of enticing places around the world...

What was I thinking! I had come dangerously close to confusing location with vacation.

To clear my head, I quickly took the escalator to the second floor. There, I sought out the seminar on "DRUMS: Networking Technology that Unites the Creative Community" (Not as catchy as "UTAH-A Masterpiece of Visual Cuisine", but what the heck.)

In a concise, one hour demo/lecture by Alan Lasky, Jim Mains, Kip Green, and Craig Allen (friendly exec-types who either sell or use the product themselves), I learned that "DRUMS" is new communications technology from Sprint and SGI that allows, for example, a director who is hard at work in one of those aforementioned exotic locations, to see (not "hear about", not "discuss a tape of", not "interrupt his schedule and fly back home to look at") what the editor has been working on back home. Whoa...What?...

Let me run that last part by again. "Drums" allows the director on location to see what the editor has been working on back home (back...HOME!) Forget Maine! This could be just the "getaway" that many location-weary editors (and editors' families) dream about! ( No more watching the editor, stripped of familiar creature comforts, become merely a creature; that nice editor, Dr. Jeckyl, need never become lonely Mr. Hyde). As the "Drums" catalog simply puts it, "Creative people can stay where they want to be, so their quality of life is better."

Here's basically how the technology works: the editor readies a sequence (or commercial spot or visual effect) for the director (or client or FX house) on the Avid (or Lightworks or video edit bay - you get the idea, right?). The sequence is then output via composite cable to a Silicon Graphics Drums workstation (It's important to note that this is not editing software. In its current capacity, Drums is mainly for high-tech show-and-tell videoconferencing).

The workstation's "capture utility" creates a low compression (4:1), high resolution Movie File which can be sent over Sprint's high-speed/wide-band/all digital/fiber-optic network to the director's Drums workstation.

Once the Movie File is received, the director and editor can screen the sequence simultaneously on the shared Movie Player, discussing it "in person" via the video camera attached to the top of the workstation. (The video feeds of the two callers appear in boxes on both workstation screens, but, unlike the Movie File, they come out as low resolution, strobing images similar to those videophones in 'Mother.') The director and editor can then make change notes on a shared digital "whiteboard" area of the screen. The notes can be saved, e-mailed, or faxed to other post-production personnel.

NY to LA in 6 minutes

According to Kip Green, the regional sales manager, Drums was designed with ad agencies, post houses and film studios in mind. It was Beta-tested for one year, and released commercially in March '96 and, so far, has been used successfully on two feature films - 'Dante's Peak' and 'Virus'.

On 'Dante's Peak', John Swallow, the director of visual effects, had two reasons for using the Drums technology: 1) to monitor the VFX footage by having it sent to his office as well as to the effects house in another part of the city and 2) to help in the race against time created by the release date set to beat rival project 'Volcano'. Using Drums cut down the time it took to get FX shown and approved. Something that might previously have taken two or three days, what with making and sending a tape, etc., ended up taking two or three hours.

So, what more could you want?

The only thing I could come up with, is to have the conferencing feature tied directly into the Avid, or whatever machine you're working on. This means - if the director says, "That's great, but wasn't there a take where he doesn't shoot himself in the foot?" - the editor will not have to say, "Yes, but I can't show you that this time. I'll have to digitize that for the next transmission." The panel said this was something Drums was "working on."

Other pros and cons might be the following:

PROS:

• It's definitely a time-saver for showing changes & getting approvals
• Don't need to send videotapes - except as a backup
• It's been tested on two feature films
• Editor is "at home" with labs, FX houses, etc.
• You can be hooked up to the Energy library of "stock" footage (20,000 clips
  available on 35mm and 3/4" for digitizing)
• The Drums Network covers the United States and London

CONS:

• It's only been tested on two feature films
• It's still called Drums 1.1 (do I hear the sound of little bugs?)
• It costs $3,300 per month for an average setup (management and
  maintenance.)
• It's not yet international - they're currently in London, and they're working on licensing agreements with Canada.
• There is no restriction on storage, but you may be restricted by the time it takes to transmit the material. The higher the quality of the source, the longer it takes (e.g. a 10-sec. sequence from D1 will take about an hour to send, whereas 30 sec. from an Avid takes 6 to 10 minutes, depending on the complexity of the images.)

I left the seminar thinking that Drums seems like a great idea (even if you don't, as I don't, understand "streaming control data" or "network conductivity") -- one that is so right for the times hat it seems like it's already been around for years!