Automated Digital Negative Management System Revolutionizes Production Workflow

Sohonet Solutions, the digital workflow consultancy arm of high speed data workflow experts, Sohonet, announces the launch of VESSEL, its revolutionary digital negative management service aimed at feature productions.
 
VESSEL strikes a blow against the overwhelming mountains of data, which filmmakers must inevitably grapple with during a production. Through continuous, automated tracking of editorial and other creative decisions made during production, VESSEL is able to make intelligent decisions about management of the digital negative; maintaining constant production access to active frames in uncompressed format. This makes all operations on digital negatives faster, cheaper and simpler, giving producers, directors and editors greater control of the project at all stages.

VESSEL's intelligent automation drastically reduces the volume and optimizes the movement of uncompressed data flow during production. The system reduces the volume of data movement by up to 200:1, in comparison to brute-force data management approaches – and all still working with completely uncompressed files. VESSEL automatically collates files to be handed off to every branch of production and post, from editorial to digital intermediate to visual effects.

"With digital film cameras such as the D21, Genesis and F35, complete file based workflows are finally becoming possible for digital productions," said Sohonet Solutions Senior Partner and Sohonet CTO Jon Ferguy. "VESSEL provides a streamlined solution for data-heavy digital productions. Its intelligent design assures that critical frames from the digital negative are always in the right place at the right time and in the right format."

VESSEL is inherently secure. Continuous tracking of the data critical to the production enables the system to create a continuously updated safety net for digital negative data, leading to an exceptional ability for rapid disaster recovery.

Current strategies for dealing with massive volumes of data result in precarious compromises, leading to fragile, slow, expensive workflows, and necessitate working with heavily compressed or low resolution image proxies deep into the production workflow.

VESSEL provides the tools, systems and support needed to effortlessly manage huge volumes of data quickly and efficiently. The dramatic increases in productivity VESSEL provides have significant impact in terms of time savings for every member of the digital production staff, while also providing cost savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars.