Director David Fincher Shot and Posted Totally Tapelessly

Director David Fincher used a completely uncompressed digital production workflow for Zodiac, his latest feature (and a Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. joint production), which heretofore hasn’t been done. Several short sequences for the movie were shot on 35mm film as well. Usually productions avoiding film have used some type of HD videotape format that adds compression.
Fincher and DP Harris Savides used two Grass Valley Viper FilmStream cameras on set in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with Zeiss DigiPrime lenses, shooting in uncompressed 10-bit 4:4:4 1920×1080/24p FilmStream mode (with a 2.37:1 anamorphic aspect ratio). Data from the Viper cameras as well as on-set metadata was captured on 20 D.MAG removable hard drives loaded into S.two Digital Film Recorders.

Captured data was transferred from D.MAG to LTO-3 data tapes using S.two’s A.Dock, where two additional LTO-3 clones were made as back-up files. The equipment was rented from, and supported by, The Camera House, in North Hollywood, CA.

For more on the workflow, visit www.grassvalley.com/news/2007/assets/zodiac/.