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Tuesday, July 12, 2011

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Welcome to workflow 2011. Some wags are calling it Deadwood, while others are referring to it as High Noon. But there are few, if any, bad guys here, simply a production picture that has become excessively fragmented and in need of a new sheriff—a plan to bring some order to the wide and wild variety of workflow solutions.

Over the last decade, wagon trains full of new cameras, sensors, compression schemes and production protocols have appeared in the production environment. The roles of key players—cinematographers, producers and editors among them—have undergone significant shifts in the once-orderly flow of content from production to post.

Convergent Design's Gemini 4:4:4 recorder captures uncompressed data and has a built-in LCD monitor.

And no less important, the workflow inherited from over 100 years of film production has, in many cases, little relevance in today's digital production arena. As one senior production observer notes, "Workflows are like snowflakes. There are no two alike, and once they hit the ground, they simply disappear."

In conversations with a variety of industry observers, there's uniform agreement that what's generally considered workflow, defined here as an orderly process of controlling the transfer of recorded content from the set or stage to postproduction, changes wildly from production to production.

For this article, HDVP discusses workflow with (among others) Andy Romanoff, Industry Relations and Business Development, AbelCine; Bryce Button, Product Marketing Manager, AJA; Dan May, President, Blackmagic Design; Sarah Priestnall, Vice President, Market Development, Codex; Dan Keaton, Director of Sales and Marketing, Convergent Design; Steven Poster, ASC, National President of the International Cinematographers Guild; and Jon Tatooles, Managing Director, Sound Devices.

When production was dominated by film—probably a given up to the last five years or so—workflow was dictated by the film medium itself and by the cinematographers whose job it was to ensure the director's vision was enshrined on celluloid.
"For many years, the cinematographer was responsible for the image because so much of the image was created at the moment of [filming]," explains Andy Romanoff, a former longtime Panavision executive. "It was locked. You could modify the overall lighting or color afterward, but there was no way to go in and deeply massage the image."

Romanoff notes that today's tools allow the transformation of images in ways traditional filmmakers couldn't have imagined and at various stages—from traditional in-camera image development to the camera capture being only the beginning point of the finished image. Moreover, the people whose say is paramount in how that workflow will proceed may shift from production to production, based as much on the role their technology plays in the process as the natural emergence of leadership in any enterprise.

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