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Post in the Field

Aug 25, 2010 12:00 PM, By Michael Cioni, CEO of LightIRON Digital

A virtual on-set extension of a post house.

           

Having an Outpost on set offers significant savings for the production. We start around 15 percent cheaper because we’re eliminating the overhead of a traditional post laboratory. As your shooting ratio goes up, the savings increase because you’re never billed by the hour for footage. You have a manager of the data on set anyway to do backup. If we train that person to run the cart, we’re only adding a small percentage to what they do already. It just so happens that you’re paying for that person to be there all day— it doesn’t matter how many hours you actually shoot or how many copies you need to make.

Outpost isn’t designed for tape-based capture systems, which require a more complex, unwieldy infrastructure, thus defeating the very purpose of a mobile Outpost, but it isn’t limited to just Red cameras on major motion pictures either. Outpost can be used with other file-based recording cameras such as Silicon Imaging’s SI-2K and Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II and EOS 7D DSLRs. We have projects under way to integrate the system with Arri’s new Alexa camera.

Outposts have been established on smaller productions, television series and even commercials. Undercovers, the new NBC series from J.J. Abrams, is using Outpost while shooting with the Red camera.

The fourth installment of Disney’s Pirates saga, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, is shooting in 3D in Hawaii with Red cameras and has an Outpost manned by Freebairn and Zach Hilton on set. Well, technically it’s in a hotel ballroom to take advantage of that facility’s high-speed Internet connection to move files back and forth to Los Angeles. Dailies for the director and backup, however, are happening all on location. In the case of Pirates, they’re shooting with up to four 3D rigs. We process those separately for backup and make 2D dailies. (For mobile devices, it’s currently a 2D world, but not for long.) The Red company has built software called RedCine-X, which will display dailies in 3D on monitors in real time right out of the Mac computer. In fact, any project we are a part of with Red, we can play dailies out of a Mac in realtime right using RedCine-X.

As people see more and more of our carts out there, they are going to realize that there are numerous advantages over shipping it to an off-site lab. The end result is not only more creative control, but also the best way to insure a metadata-rich handshake between production and post.

The CEO of LightIRON Digital, Michael Cioni has more than a decade of progressive postproduction filmmaking experience. Before forming LightIRON Digital, he spent six years at PlasterCITY Digital Post, which he co-founded in 2003 and built into one of Hollywood’s preeminent desktop-based postproduction facilities. He is a founding member and instructor at REDucation, the official Red camera education and training program. He sits on the board of directors of both the Hollywood Post Alliance and Filmmakers Alliance, and he served as an adjunct faculty member for USC's Annenberg School of Journalism.