IO Film started in 2001 out of one room in an office building, with one chair, one screen, a BARCO projector and a homegrown scanner and color-management system. The company was originally founded to do digital titles and opticals, with an eye towards DI.
Most recently, a capital partner invested in IO Film along with purchasing The Post Group, Runway Editorial, Nova Star, and Momentum VFX. And he built a 25,000 square foot facility in Hollywood to house all the companies under one roof. IO Film CTO Kevin Mullican talks about how he designed a DI facility from scratch.
DI STUDIO: What were the key considerations in designing a new DI facility?
KEVIN MULLICAN: It’s relatively straightforward. Our partner wanted to have a theater where he could do feature-film screenings and digital screenings. We helped him design that with the idea we could also use it as a DI suite. We also built three other DI suites. Inside the theatre, you want to be sitting a specific, ideal distance from the screen, [and] you need a large enough workspace for the color station. That’s basically it. They’re essentially little black-box theatres.
What were you especially eager to design into the new facility?
We are a fully procedural DI facility. We do everything virtually, with a single render step at the end. It’s a virtual conform, a virtual dust-bust, a virtual color-correction session. When it’s done, all these are rendered at the same time to a final versions, the version that goes to film, another HD master and the Digital Cinema master.
You always had your own tools. For the new facility, you bought them. How did you decide what tools to bring on board?
We [originally] wrote all our tools. We got into full HD feature films, conforming and color-correcting them and shooting them back out to film. That’s how our DI pipeline fleshed out. Our editorial pipeline was done in HD. When we married the two, we had a DI facility.

It became obvious quickly we needed to expand rapidly on all fronts. We needed a better scanner, and software written for DIs. We just purchased a Northlight for our scanner. We think it is the proper technology for solving the problem of scanning film. We’ve built two ourselves and we know the pitfalls of other ways of scanning.

For the color-correction part, we chose Nucoda because they were the only ones willing to work with us to integrate it seamlessly into a SAN environment. We have a centralized storage environment, and all our machines hang off of that.