DIGITAL DAILIES for clients?

[Ken Corben]

What ideas do you have for client deliverables?

Hard drive on location or next day DVD if client selects low res output?

DVD or hard drives with DVPRO HD 720p?

Ideas?

[Brook Willard]

How big of a cheese are your clients? Are they used to DV, HD, 35mm prints...? Their expectations will shape your deliverables.

[Ken Corben]

This from a guy that jumps out of perfectly good airplanes - hehe

No, seriously Brook - what would you do if client wants a DVCPRO HD 720p digital daily for their HDCAM deliverable in terms of real time work flow?

[Brook Willard]

Will you have "staff" who can take care of all of this for you or is it something you'll be handling once you get off of the set? What sort of budget will you have? Is there enough money to have a deck hooked up to the camera's HD SDI outputs on set or will you have to deal with it at the end of the night?

[Ken Corben]

Typical non-fiction television budget - WYSIWYG - no staff, no deck, no craft service just two-three guys working their arses off and loving it.

[Joel Kaye]

Typical non-fiction television budget - WYSIWYG - no staff, no deck, no craft service just two-three guys working their arses off and loving it.

Here's one idea - Vantec AVOX Jukebox AVX-100TX (I've never used it) :

http://www.cluboverclocker.com/revie...AVOX/Page2.htm
http://www.vantecusa.com/products/av...vox_manual.pdf

It's a hard drive case with 720p out via component. Comes with a remote control. Buy 3 or 4 and keep them coming and going overnight.

I saw one at Fry's for $99 (w/o hard drive). If it's really easy to pop in hard drive maybe you just buy two AVOX's and send hard drives only. It's a very small unit. You may have to use divX or another codec instead of DVCPROHD though.

[J. Bernard Vallon]

What about an H.264 output and play it off of a regular old external hard drive?

On the worflow page, REDCine says it can output to H264 directly. That gives you a high quality HD image at a low datarate for easy playback. You could probably work with the same output settings overnight for the whole shoot. Simple curve, no sharpening, donres to 1080p, export as h264. wake up at 3am and check on it.

[Chris Kenny]

Encoding H.264 at 1080p requires some pretty serious CPU power. When you add in the overhead of demosaicing the RAW image, and the time it'll take to copy the data off the digital magazines you've filled that day... "overnight" might not be long enough.

If you're sending your digital dailies over the Internet, it might be worth it, since you can get decent quality files probably 1/8 of the size of DVCPRO HD files. But if you're distributing on hard drives, DVCPRO HD would be fine. And with DVCPRO HD, your digital dailies can double as your editing proxies, eliminating the need to re-encode twice.

[Christian Berg]

Could RedCine be Automator enabled? Overnight it encodes the RedRaw files to mpg2 and then makes a DVD studioproject of it with chapters. Then just hit burn and you´ll have a complete DVD with all the takes.
A export to website function would also be nice. Just hit the button and then it exports everything into QuickTime or Flashfiles and creates a website with all the clips and timecode. The client can then see it all off the internet.

[Nick Shaw]

I think for both these situations an additional application would be required. What you are looking for is beyond the remit of REDCINE - certainly v1.0.

However both ideas would be very usefull. Since REDCINE batch processes to Quicktime Movies, what you need is an automatable application that can look at a folder full of QTs, and produce a web page or DVD of all the takes, complete with thumbnails and burned in meta-data. Indeed you could potentially take REDCINE out of the equation, as with the codec, the original REDCODE files would be seen by such an application as QTs which it could work from.

Anybody know of an application which could do this? Or anybody want to write one?