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Avid Symphony Nitris

Apr 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Steffen Kaus, Action Concept

Creating an HD Action Workflow

As one of the world's largest full-service production companies specializing in action-based films and television projects, Cologne, Germany-based Action Concept handles everything from scriptwriting to postproduction inhouse. We've even gained a reputation for our own stunt work, winning several Taurus World Stunt Awards, affectionately known as the “Stunt Oscars.”

In the past several years, an increasing number of our clients in the international market have required HD delivery on D5, so it has been critical to our business to work HD into our production process — a trend many facilities are beginning to address, or at least consider.

Faced with this new deliverable, we had to significantly rethink our workflow. One interesting challenge specific to action movies is that we have lots of stunts — and we always shoot on film. However, filming stunts in HD isn't possible because most stunts are shot at high speed, around 100fps to 150fps, which HD cameras can't yet handle. In addition, the cameras themselves are still too expensive to risk placing them in the middle of a crash or stunt, even if they are encased in crash boxes for protection. To work around this limitation, we scan to HD, which serves as a great digital intermediate for our work.

We've used an Avid editing workflow all the way back to the time when we were only doing SD work. Now, our postproduction operations are built around a shared-storage environment using a 1.7TB Avid Unity LANshare, which connects six Avid Media Composer XL systems for offline editing. Before our move to HD, we relied on a Symphony Meridien system as our primary finishing system for all SD work. The system was always great for conforming, playout, and exporting shots for VFX. At the time (five years ago), it was also the only 1:1 online system available from Avid. But, of course, it could not handle HD.

Tackling the HD Workflow

Our first experience with HD turned out to be a feature film project titled The Clown. Because of our familiarity with Symphony's finishing tools and the effectiveness of the workflow we had in place, an HD Symphony system would have been our first choice for HD finishing if it had been available at the time. Instead, we took the project to a facility to online it with Final Cut Pro, but the system ran into problems conforming an Avid 24p project. The result was that the editors on the project ended up eye-matching online edits with the offline version. The edits that involved speed effects tended to be the most likely not to conform.

After that experience with Final Cut Pro, we decided we would do the next online on Avid DS Nitris. Using this finishing system, our HD workflow was vastly superior, but we missed the Total Conform that we were accustomed to in our SD workflow when we transferred offline projects to Symphony Meridien. In SD, we carried over all the speed effects, ramps, and other image effects inherent in our effects-heavy projects.

Avid HD Total Conform Arrives

All in all, our HD workflow was decent but not ideal for what we wanted. We continued to have many conversations with Avid about our workflow challenges; at one point, they told us about plans to develop Symphony Nitris. With the prospect of having Total Conform in HD, we felt the new system could be a great solution to smooth our HD workflow. Avid invited us to participate in the beta test program, and we saw our involvement as the perfect way for us to influence the product design and highlight the features we were looking for and that we have enjoyed in our SD workflow.

During the beta period, we did run into bugs, but we expected that. Overall, considering we were running a Beta build, the system performed very well; Avid was very quick to address our issues with fixes and advice. Toward the end of the beta cycle, Symphony Nitris appeared ready for prime time, so we stressed the system as we would for regular projects.

We put Symphony Nitris to the test finishing a 90-minute HD action movie called Good Girl, Bad Girl, which screened in February at the Berlin International Film Festival. The feature was shot on 16mm film and transferred to HD D5 tape. The offline editing was done on Media Composer systems from DigiBeta dailies and transferred to the Symphony Nitris system, taking full advantage of the system's Total Conform capabilities for HD finishing.

On a tight deadline, this project was a realistic gauge of the system's performance and efficiency, and it delivered as we expected. Every single edit decision and effect from the offline, from speed effects to split screens to re-sizing, was taken over to the HD timeline seamlessly. We had come to expect everything to look exactly the same when conforming in SD, and it was very impressive to see the exact conform in HD. In Symphony Nitris, we also had the added convenience of automatically scaling SD material in an HD timeline, which was great for this project given that we mixed many materials in different formats.

A New Efficiency for HD

Today, Symphony Nitris has become a central part of our HD post operations. The typical television episode that we produce used to require up to six hours to export shots and clips for the visual effects department; now the process is completed in about 30 minutes, which frees up time to work on other projects. We attribute the time savings to the Symphony Nitris' Total Conform along with the Nitris hardware acceleration. Together, they provide a significant speed boost over the Meridien hardware.

In conclusion, we found Symphony Nitris to be like any other Avid we had worked with previously. Realistically, any Avid editor can create HD projects without having to learn any other software, and there's no reason for post facilities to worry about transitioning to HD if they're on Avid. We've found HD to fit perfectly into our existing workflow — one we've spent many years fine tuning — and that's everything for us.

Steffen Kaus, VFX producer for Action Concept, worked as an editor for several years before switching to visual effects. Kaus is now involved in optimizing the workflow in the visual effects department.

With more than 150 full-time employees, Action Concept, based in Cologne, Germany, is one of the largest full-service production companies dedicated to live-action cinema and video. For more information, visit www.actionconcept.com.

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