Miscellaneous

When I started on this website - which seems like a very long time ago. I remember having a list as long as my arm, covering the areas I felt needed covering which would fully represent the Digital Intermediate in any kind of scope and depth to be useful or informative. Hopefully not being overly technical and certainly not dull, although in my heart I know there are a few sections which need a little more interest - how you make calibration sexy though is beyond me?

However I realised as this website grew, the way technology progresses will continually change the DI workflow. When I first started in the industry as a Data Operator, eons ago, the production disks myself and my colleagues were responsible for, numbered I believe around 4 terabytes! Which let me tell you was an astronomical figure back then and when ever I mentioned the size, friends mouths would gape, plus the cost of the production disks was the cost of a small house back then too!

When the companies DI Lab (I believe the first in the UK) opened, our disk space more than doubled over night, 6Tb came online. Data management was excruciating. Even simply transferring data between production disks and the DI lab, which in essence were separate entities but housed within the same building, was very slow. Transfer was approx 2 frames per second (anyone remember HIPPI), which now horrifies me, especially when you can transfer 2K in real time and faster. Also most of this happened in the wee small hours, doused to our eyeballs in caffeine. The data transfer had to happen late when the main operator was tucked up in bed because any access time to disk affected the front end user, slowing the interface or worse freezing it completely. Now all of this can happen in the background because bandwidths are so much bigger.

During my tenure within the industry it has amazed me how digital data and speeds have increased to such an extent it certainly has changed the way things work. To view an effect which was being composited in 2K, dailies every day were either crowding round a calibrated computer monitor, while each low resolution set of images were loaded into a flicker book and reviewed. Or alternatively, every shot was printed back to film and viewed the following morning on the optical projector. An expensive, labour resourceful and painful procedure, especially when you need to review the shot again and again, some may not even be 24 frames long! Fortunately the facility I worked in had a specialised projector which could run at lower speeds and could 'rock n roll' - go forwards and backwards, which normal projectors simply cannot do. Many years later I purchased that original projector second hand (by accident) for my own lab - it still had my hand scrawled labeling on it (fond memories).

Today we can watch 'data' dailies via a fully calibrated projector in real time 4K, or two streams for stereoscope. Even when I first joined Quantel and they were playing High Definition, which is smaller than 2K, I was utterly amazed at the progress and could see what their innovations could do.

The point is I realised the subject is vast and open ended, the landscape is always changing along with the operating technology. What does not seem possible today will probably be the standard tomorrow. Which is ultimately what this Miscellaneous section is all about, it will allow me to additively expand the website with innovations and new ideas or workflow, plus any fun stuff I can think of adding, so keep checking back for new stuff!!