Why Production is the Future of Post-Production

Earlier this month, systems integrator and workflow solutions provider ALT Systems appointed Bruno Munger director of technical sales. Munger has 17 years of experience in this business, including stints of product-management time at companies including Digital Vision, Autodesk, MTI, and Snell & Wilcox. At ALT Systems, Munger will be charged with developing new systems and workflow for post-production facilities. StudioDaily rang him up to ask him about the future of post, what he took away from last week's HPA Tech Retreat, and what he sees on tap at NAB in April.
Q: As technology and tapeless workflows evolve, are the problems faced by visual-effects companies and high-end post-production and finishing problems converging on some level?

A: They’re all having their own problems. Companies like Hydraulx in Santa Monica, doing their own movies, or Efilm, doing several DIs a year, will have different but similar problems. It’s how do you move data fast and with the minimum amount of labor. Budgets are not going up, especially for finishing. And all of a sudden you’re asked to do more than you have before. How do you streamline that workflow? How do you make sure you don’t have five people doing the job one person can do? How do you manage the storage? How do you move projects within the facility, impacting the smallest number of people? With stereo 3D finishing, you get about 75 percent more work than on a 2D DI, and the budget is not 75 percent more money. So how do you do a stereo workflow without putting your facility on its knees?

Bruno MungerQ: Is efficiency the most important factor?

A: Efficiency, yes, but it’s really about whether you can do a big project at the same time that you’re doing other projects. The math doesn’t work if you only do one project for six months. You have to be able to put a huge project in your facility, scale for that project, and still be able to service other clients.

Q: Do you commonly see facilities laid low by a single project? And how do you address that problem?

All the time. The producer wants the best for his movie. He’ll say, “It’s not my problem you guys don’t have enough storage for my DI.” You have to look at new solutions, maybe on a rental basis or maybe with a technology that does the same thing these vendors are used to with less money. People are used to a humongous SAN that costs a million dollars, but it may not be necessary to have that huge SAN. In the year 2000, that was the only thing that could provide the throughput and the capacity, but now other technologies can do the same thing, allowing scaling up and down without that capital investment in the beginning when building a facility.

Q: How was the HPA Tech Retreat? Did you see anything especially intriguing? Were there any controversies?

HPA is the show to go to in this business. It’s a cornerstone of our industry. You think that going to NAB or IBC, you’ll be OK, but this is the only conference I know where you can sit and actually learn stuff without having to speak with a million customers. At least, this has been my experience in the past.

As far as this year’s retreat, first of all, it seems that stereo is a failure when it comes to consumer electronics. Nobody is buying 3D TVs. Stereo 3D for the main public will be a theater experience for the next couple of years.

The other thing is that we finally have proper monitoring for post-production. For many years we’ve been looking to replace CRTs with something that can have proper blacks and whites with the proper refresh rate. Finally, with Sony’s OLED technology and Dolby’s [LED] monitoring, we have proper studio monitoring equipment to show adequate dynamic range – in some cases, even better than CRT. You can buy a $26,000 Sony monitor and tell your customers, “This is as good as anything you’ve ever watched.”

Q: What about NAB? What technology trends are on your radar?

Post facilities are evolving. It’s no longer a neat division between production and post-production. You have more on-set grading systems, and you have more production people doing final grading decisions on set the same day you are shooting. Fotokem has systems to make deliverables and do grading on set. Michael Cioni at Lightiron Digital has his own on-set system. Post facility owners might not have any capital expenditures for new equipment this year, but they need to offer new services to their customers, like on-set grading, so post is moving to the production side. I think that move is going to define the next five to 10 years in our industry.

What really triggered this is data workflows. With film, you had to wait a day for dailies and that didn’t matter. But the ARRI Alexa, the Red One and Red MX and now the Epic? All these bring up new challenges. How do you deliver Blu-ray dailies from an Alexa shoot? Post needs to be on set, and they need to do it in a cost-effective way. The production people don’t have the same kind of money. You need to do it for $3,000 a week – that’s the kind of budget the DIT and post facilities are looking at. It’s not like a finishing job, where money is less of an object.

So the question is what solution will be most cost-effective to allow productions to make those decisions on set. If you look at Narnia, if you look at The Amazing Spider-Man, if you look at Pirates of the Caribbean, all of the new productions have less expensive systems on set so the DP can make final or close-to-final grading decisions. That’s going to be the talk of NAB.

For more on ALT Systems: www.altsystems.com.