NEWS
Bamborough's Box
Codex Digital Blurs the Line Between Production and Post
by Debra Kaufman
 Paul Bamborough fiddles with the Codex Digital under the watchful eye of his video image. |
Some people can see the future of digital cinema. Others, like Paul Bamborough, are helping to create it. If the name rings a bell, it’s no wonder: He’s one of the founders of Lightworks, one of the early nonlinear editing systems to which many editors gravitated, enamored of its editing-familiar interface, among other features.
Now the London-based Bamborough is back, with Codex Digital––another innovation that promises to impact the editor and the post-production workflow. It’s the name of the product, as well as his company, which he cofounded. The story begins not long after Lightworks was sold to Tektronix. Bamborough told Delwyn Holroyd––who Bamborough describes as “one of the best engineers at Lightworks”––that he would back him if Holroyd ever came up with any interesting technology. After a stint with 5D, a UK company that built engines for full bandwidth colorizing and compositing, Holroyd took Bamborough up on his offer.
“Delwyn came to me and said, ‘There’s a need for a very high-resolution recorder for the upcoming 2K and 4K digital cameras,’” Bamborough recalled. “I thought it was a good idea.” Why? “Lightworks came along because there was a revolution in post-production—you could see it was all going to computers and it was fun to help make that happen,” he responds. “Now there is another revolution. Everyone is going to shoot everything digitally and they’re going to be doing it much sooner than they think they will. I know from still photography that when people make the decision to go digital, it’ll happen fast.”
Fair enough. But should editors, who are already ensconced in the digital realm, really care? “The thing that interested me is that there is a much deeper revolution,” Bamborough continues. “Nothing intrinsic says that production and post are serial. If you were parachuted onto this planet and no one had ever told a motion picture story, but our technology existed, would you design a process in which highly trained people pointed a camera at something and then thought they could do more detailed work on it tomorrow? Or next week?”
 "There is a lot to be said for an editor being able to cut a sequence as it's being shot." -Paul Bamborough |
The answer to that hypothetical question, according to Bamborough, is a resounding “No. I think the revolution is that production and post will start working together in parallel,” he claims. “Even now, you have visual effects people pre-building models.” It’s true that visual effects have evolved from a strictly post-production process to one that is intimately integrated with production. But, for now at least, whether the recording medium is film or tape, the production-to-post-production equation remains linear. On set, whether it’s film or tape, all you can do is view the footage.
“You can’t color it, you can’t do compositing or effects,” he continues. “You can’t do any of the
post processes. But if you record it to a computer…at that moment you are able to do something with it. The visual effects supervisor can make sure right away that the models work with the shots. You’ll never tear down a set or leave a location without knowing that it is fitting or working.”
In fact, with the advent of digital cameras, productions have begun to inch into doing more than simply viewing footage, with some attempting to try some color correction on set. But the impact hasn’t yet trickled down to the editor, and Bamborough believes all that is about to change. “The same thing applies to editors,” he claims. “From where I stand—and some people will disagree with me profoundly—there is a lot to be said for an editor being able to cut a sequence as it’s being shot.”
Bamborough said he has “limited experience” directing and has worked with editors he knows well. “I love the idea that they can work on the material as it’s being gathered,” he says. “The story should be told how you want it to be told; that makes sense to an editor.”
 From left, Dalsa Digital's Alan Lask and Gina Palmer, and Codex Digital engineer Philip Meehan work on a spec beer commercial shot by Curtis Clark, ASC, to test the viability of the Dalsa 4k camera. The Codex machines are visible on the bottom right. |
Giving an example, Bamborough posits, “Suppose the editor comes to you and says, ‘We have the performances, we don’t need to shoot those reverses.’ If you decide not to do them, you save hours of work, and those hours can add up to wonderful cost savings. I’m not saying you have to work in any particular way, but these are the possibilities. We’re working with people who do green screen work and they agree that if you could do it live, they could get out of there in a fraction of the time. These are just some of the things you can do.”
The specifics of Codex Digital are actually quite simple. It’s a box that has two functions. First, it’s a recorder that will record digital data from any of the existing digital cameras. Secondly, it’s also a server over a network which can transcode the data into any format commonly used—and deliver it immediately. The basic Codex Digital box stores a maximum of four hours online at any one time.
“The moment you’ve shot something, we record it in a raw format, for the best picture quality,” Bamborough explains. “Codex will configure the footage so that any computer—running After Effects or Final Cut Pro, any Discreet box, anything—can see it in its native file format, named and organized with how the production is configured. You just pick it up off the Codex. It’s a magic box in which any kind of file is simply there.”
The beauty of this solution is that it is so straightforward and easy to implement, according to Bamborough. “Everyone can get his or her version of the footage––from a screening copy to a script supervisor with a PDA who can have a low-resolution proxy,” he continues. “And it’s all centralized in one place and immediately available to post-production.”
Bamborough notes that another Lightworks alumnus is behind Sohonet, a digital delivery system that started up in London’s Soho district and now is essentially worldwide (the company opened a Santa Monica office recently). “If you’ve got Sohonet in place, the network for the Codex Digital footage can extend across the world, so people working collaboratively can be on different continents, and it can all be done in parallel while the movie is being made,” he offers. “That’s the core of it. It takes production to the editor’s world and takes the editor and puts him or her into the production world.”
The possible configurations are endless, with the editor working on set, at the studio or even on location. Bamborough has discussed the idea of drawing the editor more closely into the production process and “many agree it would be wonderful to know what’s happening as it’s happening,” he says. “Others say, ‘Get away, I don’t want to think about editing until later.’ Each person has a reasonable point of view and should work the way they want. But this kit of tools makes a better way possible. When something better is available, people end up using it.”
Bamborough notes that the company is also at work on a “back office” version of Codex Digital, onto which the user can hang more discs. “Then it’s a matter of time and money,” he says. “A few tens of thousands of dollars will get you hours and hours of footage at full-resolution quality. It’s pretty reasonable.
“As you build a rack with commodity drives, it gets cheap,” he continues. “There is a two-to-one price advantage of raw tape over raw drives now, but it’s certain that advantage will go away. And even if it doesn’t—if the tape becomes cheaper––the costs are down to a level where it doesn’t look scary.”
Bamborough believes that producers are key to the acceptance of the Codex Digital-based solution. “They’re the people to whom all the benefits will accrue,” he notes. “If they structure a production around a digital workflow, everyone will benefit and they can make it cheaper and more efficient. And I would argue that they’ll also make it better, because you don’t have to do safeties, you don’t need to drive actors beyond where they want to go. Different people will have different opinions about what matters. But it’s a benign mix of greater efficiencies.”
As of yet, no major film production has used the Codex Digital in a production, but deals are brewing and will be announced shortly, according to Bamborough. In the meantime, he continues to spread his message about blurring the lines between production and post.
“Codex Digital is a solutions company masking itself as a hardware company,” he explains. In the new digital age, more than ever, it’s all about the workflow.
Debra Kaufman is a freelance writer who is also West Coast Editor of Film & Video Magazine, and editor of DI Studio, an online newsletter on digital intermediates. She can be reached at dkla@ca.rr.com.
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