“People enjoy eating sausage,” says Dave Satin. “They don’t want to see how it’s made.” Naturally, he’s talking about cutting-edge digital workflows. Producers, directors and cinematographers want to shoot the formats they like without fretting over questions about formats and color calibration. It's Satin's job to make sure their digital sausage is tasty.

Satin is the director of engineering at Mega Playground’s new facility in New York City. Located on Hudson Street in the West Village, the location boasts 40 Avid systems, four online suites, and three Avid Unity storage networks. Mega Playground’s bread and butter is reality TV and feature film work – M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water is among its recent jobs – and owner Eitan Hakami says his immediate goal is the creation of a digital-dailies workflow geared specifically toward digital acquisition. That’s where Satin, who most recently expanded his brain as the digital imaging technician on Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, comes in.

Although Vice was largely shot with the Thomson Grass Valley Viper, the work was mostly tape-centric rather than datacentric. “Vice was done in linear color space,” Satin explains. “No FilmStream [with its low-contrast, greenish output] for Michael Mann – he wanted to see what was happening. When we were in country, the tapes were shipped to Laser Pacific, where they digitized the circle takes to 4:2:2 HDCAM. Those were screened in Miami on an NEC iS8-2K digital projector. We did color management with TrueLight boxes.”

What about color-correction on set? Satin handled that – with cinematographer Dion Beebe sitting right next to him – using a customized control panel for the Viper that was provided by Thomson and an “800-pound cart” loaded up with 24-inch CRT monitors. “I’d look at the timeline scroll and do my first pass,” Satin says. “I read the script and understood it, and I took direction – I translated what they were saying into something we could see on screen, and I could visualize what it would look like on film.”

The goal, of course, is to maintain a workflow that allows a DP to have exact control of the image despite the fact that nearly every decision made in production and all the way though post can impact the picture. “DPs need to be the authors of their images,” Satin says. “If you’re going to shoot in logarithmic color, where you won’t have final color until the end, how do you communicate your vision?” The answer isn't cut-and-dried, but Satin feels that if a DP and director insist on a properly equipped tent on set, along with a qualified and fairly compensated DIT, that's a good first step.

Sometimes the effort will require a superhuman level of dedication on the part of a cinematographer – Satin recalls a day during the Miami Vice production when Beebe shot all night in Miami, boarded a plane at 8 a.m., flew six hours to Los Angeles, and then went straight to work on the DI for Memoirs of a Geisha.

At Mega Playground, an important challenge will be meeting the workflow requirements of reality TV shows, including the desire of reality producers to make use of the HDV format. As a digital perfectionist, Satin is not a fan of heavily compressed HDV images – but he respects the technology that goes into HDV cameras. “It’s a horrible tape format, but the cameras are awesome,” he says. “You can shoot with no light, in the dark, and the picture is pretty good. Why? It’s just a better camera.”

For an A&E reality series called The First 48 – the title refers to the crucial make-or-break period following the opening of a case for police detectives – Mega Playground had to figure out an efficient online workflow for HDV. “We use [Avid] DS Nitris and Symphony Nitris, and the problem was finding a way to deal with the online footage – which, for the first time, isn’t a very large file size,” he says. Mega Playground first tried transcoding the footage using dedicated hardware, but kept running into problems. “So we digitized the footage via FireWire in [Media Composer] Adrenaline, then transcoded the MXF files to OMF files. You load those on the Symphony, and away you go.”

Despite the rapid transformation of production and post workflows, Satin says it’s important to understand that, as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. “People talk to me about digital artifacts,” he notes, “but we’ve been looking at film artifacts for 100 years. And we’re looking at color that we can’t see until it’s processed – just like we used to.”

And, for the near future, film remains the linchpin even where digital cinematography is concerned. With the release of Miami Vice approaching, Satin's hoping the production will have time to create the digital-cinema release from a film element instead of directly from digital masters. It makes a difference, he says, because the film-out is critical to the picture’s look. “We were shooting elements that needed to go through a film process to be the final picture,” he explains. “It’s where the rubber hits the road – the interface between [digital and film]. If what you’re going to see projected on film prints is what the picture is supposed to be, I have a deep understanding of that, and it may cause me to shade the camera a certain way. The HD picture, even with look-up tables, is not the final image.”