Whether the low-budget Ultraviolet — a Sony Screen Gems August release about a subculture of genetically modified humans — is a box office success remains to be seen. But behind the scenes on the sci-fi flick, Sony’s eVTR technology helped reduce costs and save time on location for the feature production.
During shooting over seven months in China and Hong Kong last year, a constant stream of dailies was needed for approval more than 6000 miles away in Los Angeles. Rather than use expensive international couriers to shuttle video tapes, the production team converted the dailies to data files and sent them to its L.A. home office via the Internet.
Two keys to making this cost-saving delivery system work were Sony’s tape-to-data e-VTR and Orbital Data’s TotalTransport acceleration technologies. To transfer the dailies, the multi-angle HDCAM (1080/23.976) video takes were first converted to a 480/59.94 SD format and then copied to MPEG IMX tape for ingest into a non-linear editor via SDI connection. At this stage, the takes to be included as dailies were selected.
A corresponding edit decision list was then sent to a Sony e-VTR deck, where the unit’s e-VTR Manager Application software was used to compile the selections for transfer over a wide area network (WAN) from the e-VTR in Hong Kong to an e-VTR in L.A., where an identical cloned MPEG IMX tape was created.
To speed up the transfers, the production team used TotalTransport, a WAN data-acceleration technology system. This allowed footage to be transferred efficiently over the Internet.