For dailies screenings and color-correction on TNT’s Dallas, a relaunch of the classic TV franchise that’s slated to debut next summer, MTI Film in Los Angeles is turning to IP networks to move footage between Texas and Hollywood in real time. Producers in Dallas, Texas, will screen and approve dailies using MTI’s Remote Control Dailies, and MTI staff colorists will correct the footage in L.A.

Working with systems integrator Mercator Digital, MPI invested in TVG480 video gateways from T-VIPS, which allow footage to be transmitted at low bitrates with high color accuracy. The devices deliver video inside a facility via HD-SDI, and are controlled through a simple web interface.

Post-production is a relatively new market for T-VIPS, which has specialized mainly in contribution solutions for broadcasters. But the company’s expertise in video over IP networks, combined with its implementation of JPEG2000 compression starting in 2006, is drawing attention as post houses concentrate on developing more efficient workflows for long-distance collaboration.

“JPEG2000 survives five to seven encodes without sacrificing quality,” T-VIPS CEO Johnny Dolvik tells StudioDaily. That robustness appeals to the broadcast industry, which tries to maintain the highest quality possible before the inevitable final stages in which its images are aggressively MPEG-compressed for delivery to TV viewers. But it makes sense for post-production applications, too.

Uncompressed video is obviously the gold standard, but colorists can tolerate a little fuzziness around the finest details in an image as long as the color reproduction is accurate. T-VIPS says JPEG2000 fits the bill, and the ability to use IP networks makes workflow more efficient while reducing costs. “Customers tell us, ‘You have changed our workflow,'” says T-VIPS COO Janne T. Morstà¸l. “Everyone doesn’t have to sit in the same room anymore.”

How low can you go? “We’ll devote roughly 50 Mbps in each direction for the color-correction on this project,” Chernoff said in a prepared statement. “The quality of the video provided by the T-VIPS gateway at this relatively low bandwidth was a major attraction for us.”

The TVG480 is designed to support bit rates from 50 Mbps all the way up to 200 Mbps. Dolvik said JPEG2000 is visually lossless at a ratio of about 10:1 – that means you should be able to compress a 1.5 Gbps HD-SDI stream to 150 Mbps without anyone being able to tell the difference. Even if a facility is encoding video at 50 Mbps, the extra headroom would come in handy on a stereo 3D project – Morstà¸l noted that Norway’s TV2 used T-VIPS equipment earlier this week for the first 3DTV broadcast of a soccer match in that country.

For more information: www.t-vips.com.