The Fincher Feature Is Billed as the First Film Shot Entirely at 6K
Billed as the first feature film shot entirely at 6K resolution, David Fincher's Gone Girl is also the first studio feature edited entirely in Adobe Premiere Pro CC, by two-time Oscar-winner Kirk Baxter, ACE. Needless to say, Adobe is giddy about that news. And Nvidia, which makes GPUs that drive Adobe's hardware-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine, is almost as excited.
Nvidia is launching a new generation of its Quadro workstation GPUs at SIGGRAPH this week (see our coverage here), and the company announced that Gone Girl is the first feature film to use the brand-new Quadro K5200 GPU in its pipeline. Red footage was converted to DPX using a GPU-accelerated system for efficient delivery to VFX. For the creative edit, footage was converted to 2.5K ProRes files, corresponding to a 5K center extraction, and the editors viewed a 1920×1080 timeline. The Quadro-based workflow also supported up to four streams of 6K multi-camera playback with repositioning, stabilization and color-correction happening in real time, Nvidia said, and also allowed real-time downscaling of 6K footage to 4K.
GPU debayering eliminated the need for specialized hardware to accelerate the processing of Red footage, allowing multiple workstations to be used rather than funneling everything through a single system equipped with a Red Rocket card.
If you want to see Gone Girl, your first chance to view it with a paying audience will be September 26, when it opens the New York Film Festival. If you're wondering what kind of hardware it takes to make a Premiere Pro cutting room operate at peak efficiency — and we suspect that, on a David Fincher film, anything that doesn't operate at peak efficiency is out the door — here are the workstations employed for Gone Girl's various pixel-crunching processes.
Four HP Z820 Workstations
Intel Xeon E5-2670 8-core 2.6 GHz (Q1 2012)
Nvidia K5200
128 GB DDR3
Two HP Z-Turbo 256 GB drives w/sustained 1.8 GB/s throughput
SolarFlare Dual-Port 10 Gb network adapter
Two HP Z820 Workstations
Intel Xeon E5-2697 12-core 2.7 GHz (Q3 2012)
Nvidia K6000
256 GB DDR3 RAM
Cubix Expansion Chassis
Two FusionIO IoDrive 1.6 TB w/sustained 2.6 GB/s throughput
64 TB Gspeed EsPro
SolarFlare Dual-Port 10 Gb network adapter
One HP Z820 Workstation
Intel Xeon E5-2697 12-core 2.7 GHz (Q3 2012)
Nvidia K5200
128 GB DDR3 RAM
AJA Io 4K
Two FusionIO IoStorm 512 GB w/sustained 2.1 GB/s throughput
Two 2011 Mac Pro Workstations
Nvida K5200 graphics
64 GB DDR3 RAM
Source: Nvidia Case Study
Crafts: Editing Post/Finishing
Sections: Technology
Topics: Project/Case study adobe david fincher gpu acceleration kirk baxter NVIDIA premiere pro cc
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If your are going to describe systems used, perhaps it would be helpful to describe the purpose that each configuration is used for.
Are there 6k monitors?
*Movie projectors
So they edited in 2.5K and not in 6K!
And what and when they reviwed in 6K?
They have never use 6K except in vfx I suppose by reading this article.
Did they color graded on premiereCC for final release? Did they created final dcp files or tiffs with final grade and titles ready to be transfered in dcp?
Real breaking news would be that a feature movie is done whole on desktop without dedicated vfx, color grading and finishing workstatins, if they did it.
And what is the final release format? 2K DCP package, maybe 4K DCP but definitively not 6K format as there is no 6K delivery format of any kind.
For picture quality sake it could be better to shot in 5K and frame for 4K center extraction to have no resize on 4K delivery as every resize do degrade image quality.
I believe they used Davinci Resolve, i highly doubt that they graded this in premiere CC for the final release anyways. Just not powerful enough for a worldwide cinema delivery.