New Grass Valley Bones Dailies Software from Thomson Revolutionizes Digital Intermediate Workflow
New Software Benefits the Full Range of DI Processes for Significantly Faster Data Capture, Image Review and Color Correction
Bones Dailies builds on the existing power of the Bones platform, with its image restoration, data management and color correction tools. The software saves post houses time, money, and resources by enabling four individual, time-consuming dailies processes to be performed in parallel by multiple artists on a storage area network (SAN). This allows companies who have invested in digital intermediate technologies to maximize their return on investment by getting projects completed faster, more accurately, and much more efficiently.
"The idea behind Bones Dailies is that post houses can get more throughput out of their various suites, which today cannot be as efficient as they might be," said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President, Broadcast and Professional Solutions for the Grass Valley business within Thomson. "By enabling processes to happen faster than real time, and with a number of processes taking place in parallel, producers, directors and DPs as well as post houses will benefit from the improved workflow, allowing them to save time and money while retaining tighter creative control over the entire color correction and DI process."
At most post production houses today, dailies are handled in a separate process. The film is scanned, logged and graded in a linear process, with transfer ratios of 1:4 or higher common: 30 minutes of dailies will take several hours to capture and process. This is very inefficient, tying up expensive equipment, operators and suites that could be used for other purposes. More important, the grading decisions made at this stage are lost to post production: after the offline edit selected takes need to be scanned again and the color correction process restarted.
The Bones Dailies software brings the dailies operation into the mainstream digital intermediate workflow. Film is scanned, using a Grass Valley Spirit DataCine, directly into the storage area network (SAN), faster than real time: 24 frames per second movies can be transferred at 30 frames per second, a time saving of 20%. Once this speedy process is completed the Spirit can be released for other work and the original camera negative film can be securely archived.
Once on the SAN the images can be graded in a non-linear fashion, saving time and providing more creative freedom. Batch processing allows multiple shots to receive the same grade much faster than real time. Because all Bones software applications can operate on the same platform, different processes — such as image ingest, audio ingest, synchronization, grading, dust busting and scratch removal - can take place in parallel, again saving time and ensuring the best creative result.
Through the use of the Color Decision List (CDL) standard developed by the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), color decisions made in Bones Dailies are retained in the system and used to form the basis of the final grade. A logarithmic scan of the film preserves its full dynamic range, giving complete creative control to the colorist working on the data. CDL color decisions are non-destructive: they are stored as metadata instructions to modify the files, so the full range of image detail is always available. In summary, a Bones-based digital intermediate workflow incorporating Bones Dailies will get content into the process faster, with better color grading and image processing, and those grading decisions are carried throughout the process to speed and improve the final grade.
Pricing and Availability
The Grass Valley Bones Dailies software will be previewed at NAB2007 in April and will begin shipping in the third quarter of 2007. The price for a single Bones Dailies system is $120k/€95k, which includes the workstation but not the SAN. Bones Dailies and the rest of Grass Valley's digital intermediate products can be seen at NAB2007 on the dedicated Grass Valley post production booth, SL2020 in the lower South Hall.
###
About Thomson — World leader in digital video technologies
Media Relations:
|
Nicolas Jomard
Suzanne Griffiths |