Anyone who’s worked in post-production will tell you that the challenges they face every day are not only creative and technical, they’re also often logistical. Every day is a fight for and against time, as storytellers, artists and craftspeople finely hone their work while the release date looms ever closer. Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to bringing together the right visions and talents to create and refine the emotional impact of a story is geography. While remote collaboration tools have helped artists work together despite distance, it’s hard to imitate the creative experience of gathering in a theater and looking at the same screen.
For Picture Shop, meeting customers wherever they are in the world and making sure directors and cinematographers can engage and collaborate with colorists directly is paramount. “Picture Shop has facilities across the US, Canada and the UK, all connected via a secure, high-speed network. It’s not uncommon for a picture finishing project to have to travel from one facility to another to follow filmmakers and showrunners,” explains David Waters, VP of Global Technical Operations. Disclaimer, the limited series from Academy Award-winning director Alfonso Cuarón (streaming on Apple TV+ starting on October 11), challenged the Picture Shop team to find a new way to migrate projects quickly and securely to and from locations.
Supervising Colorist Peter Doyle had spent weeks color correcting Disclaimer–lensed by both Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, ASC, AMC (another multiple Academy Award winner) and Bruno Delbonnel, ASC, AFC (a six-time Academy Award nominee)–at Post Works in New York. But Lubezki needed to supervise and approve the creation of the cinema grade at Picture Shop in Hollywood to accommodate his busy prep and filming schedule.
Initially, Doyle tested remotely controlling the color corrector in New York and streaming images back to Hollywood in real-time. He quickly determined that the latency inherent to this approach would be impractical, especially for the quick, intuitive and precise adjustments expected when working with Lubezki. Moving the project data to Picture Shop would deliver the best creative experience, but would present a few challenges.
The first obstacle was the sheer volume of media: over 130 terabytes of 16-bit EXR files captured in Arri35 at Open Gate resolution (4608x3164). While high-speed network transfers are often a viable solution for moving data from one facility to another, in this case neither the schedule nor the amount of data made it an attractive or feasible solution. A faster but equally secure path would need to be found.
In addition to the size of the data footprint, its complexity also had to be considered. “Disclaimer’s file structure is much more complex than that of a typical project,” explains Doyle. “We’re using a lot of mattes, sometimes twelve to fifteen on a shot, with many VFX versions referenced.” Transferring media assets securely over network in compliance with MPA best practices requires multiple hops and data manipulation, which can introduce some changes to the file structure and organization of the assets. In the case of this project, such changes risked creating issues and engendering additional effort; why disassemble the puzzle only to have to reassemble it?
To quickly move the data from New York to Los Angeles, Picture Shop elected to use Tsecond’s BRYCK platform: an encryption-capable, portable, NVME-based storage solution that offers up to 1PB of capacity in a rugged, compact form factor. Post Works copied the 130TB of image data bit-for-bit to a 256TB-capacity, 4”x4”x9.5” BRYCK storage module, that connected via its dock–or Tray–to a high-performance server to deliver 10 gigabytes per second of throughput. The encrypted, tamper-proof BRYCK, containing a perfect replica of the project’s data structure was then transported to Los Angeles, where it was connected directly to Doyle’s Baselight system via a Tray and server. The unadulterated data structure relinked to his timeline flawlessly and effortlessly. “This project leverages several high-precision color and texture effects, so I needed to pre-cache and pre-render all seven hours of program ahead of the theatrical trim pass with Chivo. I was pleased to see that the BRYCK could sustain the throughput needed to get this done so quickly.” Once the adjustments were finalized and approved by the cinematographer, Doyle rendered the resulting 4K DCDMs and uncompressed, full-resolution archival deliverables directly to the BRYCK.
For Doyle, who often works with busy, globe-trotting filmmakers who need to supervise their projects across several locations, the BRYCK “has been kind of a godsend, frankly”. Beyond the massive capacity in a small form factor, it's the speed and throughput that the BRYCK provides that enables this paradigm shift in data portability. With the BRYCK, Doyle and Picture Shop can support image creators wherever they need to be.