Digital Dailies

With security top of mind since September 11, digital dailies technology is finding even greater acceptance in production communities

By Christine Bunish

“Digital dailies have always had a lot of appeal for distant points, but now they have appeal even for shorter distances,” notes Janet Swift, marketing communications manager at Telestream Inc. With tighter security on studio lots and some studios handling mail and couriered material off-site, digital dailies are a convenient solution for those not already swayed by the technology’s time and cost savings.

Telestream’s ClipMail Pro
ClipMail Pro from Nevada City, Calif.-based Telestream Inc. (www.telestream.net), which made its debut at NAB 1999, is the company’s first video delivery appliance for professional applications. “It’s an affordable way to send high-quality video over the Internet,” says Janet Swift. “It takes media from tape sources, digitizes it, encodes it to MPEG-1 or 2 files and delivers it over the Internet using store and forward [standard FTP] technology. Media travels as fast as a network service can send it.”

Service providers EDnet and Wam!Net use ClipMail, as do London-based The Mill’s Beam.TV and Moving Picture Company’s MPC Online services. Toronto-based producer Alliance Atlantis uses EDnet and ClipMail Pro to speed deliveries of dailies for the syndicated TV series BeastMaster, shot in Australia by Cutting Edge, to coproducer Tribune Entertainment in Hollywood and to the show’s post facility, Command Post & Transfer in Toronto. The facility gets a three-day lead on tape deliveries for exchange of digital dailies, and ClipMail Pro automatically performs standards conversion. “Over 1,000 ClipMail Pro units have been installed,” says David Heppe, Telestream’s VP of marketing and business development. “A number of larger projects are coming in after pilot projects that tested the concept for entertainment companies. So we feel ClipMail appliances are coming into their own.”

Although encoded files can be sent to an FTP server, then routed to the receiver’s desktop where they are decoded, files are typically delivered to another ClipMail Pro user, most of whom have T-1 connections.

“A lot of production houses like the flexibility of selecting the encoding quality level,” Swift notes. “You can use a highly-compressed file in the early stages of production or select higher-quality encoding in the final stages of a project when you’re working on effects sequences.”

Telestream has introduced two additional video delivery appliances since ClipMail Pro debuted. ClipExpress bowed in 2000. It encodes to broadcast but not master quality and doesn’t have the range of professional tape format I/Os of ClipMail Pro. ClipExpress is ideal for news gathering and for agencies and their clients who look to play out the files on a video monitor. Clip Remote, a kind of portable ClipExpress, was launched in 2001 for field applications. It uses satellite phones for delivery.

ClipMail Pro currently has a 2 GB file size limitation so it has been better suited to delivering shorter dailies clips rather than lengthy files. ClipMail Pro 4.0, which will be released at NAB 2002, will accommodate larger file sizes. A pre-NAB release adds the ability to start sending a file while the file is still being digitized or encoded, which helps speed throughput.

Telestream is also looking at faster network transfer speeds, and Heppe reports an increased interest by third-party developers in embedding a controlling ClipMail appliance in their products. “At NAB we’ll announce the ability of developers to include metadata with the media as it is sent,” Heppe adds.

On its Web site Telestream offers a directory of service bureaus and facilities where its systems can be found. Quickly pinpointing ClipMail sites proved crucial for those who needed to get video out in the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11 when planes were grounded.

Picture PipeLine
Picture PipeLine LLC’s fully-integrated suite of secure broadband production tools provides users with digital dailies with annotation features, realtime collaboration via streamed video and file transfer. The Carson, Calif.-based company (www.picturepipeline. com) was established in October 2000 to market secure network solution technology developed by aerospace and defense technology giant TRW Inc. It provides a complete service package to users, including consultancy, hardware and software, connectivity and 24/7 tech support.

“Security is our highest priority,” says VP of sales and marketing Charlie Mitchell. “Everything is encrypted in transit and on the hard drive.”

Picture PipeLine runs on Windows NT or 2000 platforms. Senders and receivers need Picture PipeLine systems at both ends, “but once the system is on a studio lot, people can view material on their desktops with our box acting as the server,” Mitchell explains.

Picture PipeLine is scaleable from MPEG-1 to broadcast-quality MPEG-2. “TV series seem to work in the MPEG-1, VHS-quality realm,” notes Mitchell, “while dailies from Australia were sent to the Warner Bros. screening room in MPEG-2 for Scooby-Doo.” Dailies are delivered in the store-and-forward mode with synchronous playback and voice, graphical or text annotations.

Last November Warner Bros. Studios announced it will install Picture PipeLine’s digital delivery and production tools in its post production facility on its Burbank lot. The initial installation will include 11 desktops and one screening room and may ultimately ramp up to some 100 workstations. Picture PipeLine will encode dailies and deliver them to production personnel’s desktops where they can view scenes and editing notations. Editing notes are seachable by take, allowing staff to go directly to a given point in the film.

Warner Bros. currently uses Picture PipeLine as a digital production tool for its drama series Third Watch, and previously tapped the system for the features The Perfect Storm, Down & Under and others.

“Warner Bros has always been on the cutting edge,” Mitchell says. “They have realized that distributing tapes all over the lot is not necessarily an efficient way to operate.

“Whether we’re delivering dailies from Australia or [locally] from a tape, we encode the telecine’s Flexfile so when you see the material on your desktop the keycode information is embedded in the playback,” he continues. “When you click the ‘take’ button, you can review the takes you want, delete the ones you don’t want and create your own play list.”

Picture PipeLine has already been enhanced quite a bit from its debut product based on what clients want, Mitchell notes. He says the production community was already adopting Picture PipeLine at a rapid rate before September 11 prompted non-users to take their first — or second — look at digital dailies and digital production tools.

“When many shows couldn’t get their tapes after 9-11, ours could,” Mitchell recalls. “Third Watch, which shoots in Brooklyn and has its telecine and editorial in LA, was able to get back in production relatively quickly with Picture PipeLine on an episode featuring real-life firemen, policemen and paramedics. They had over 70 hours of material. If they had to ship tapes, they never would have got to air on time.”

Media.net
Media.net (www.media.net/) offers a number of services related to digital delivery of product. Its private, OC3-speed network in Los Angeles connects major studios, post facilities and production offices. It now extends to New York, Toronto and Vancouver-based studios and post houses allowing users to quickly move video content at a high quality to numerous locations.

Media.net’s Data Center in LA is a hosting platform which stores, streams and transcodes material supporting the overall production solution.

Media.net also offers customers a set of applications that can be customized to meet their needs. The product “Digital Dailies“ gives producers and network executives the ability to view MPEG-2 encoded dailies, streamed off the Media.net server, to their desktop or TV. Edit System Dailies allows a post house to encode and post dailies to the Data Center for delivery to editors’ Avid systems. Producer’s Cuts permits users to post MPEG-2 encoded edited cuts to the Media.net server to be viewed and commented on. Video Conferencing enables creatives in different locations to participate in table reads of scripts. Live Video Collaboration gives producers the feeling of being present at the edit session.

“Digital Dailies and Edit System Dailies seem to resonate with people. They’re almost automatic with every customer,” says chief operating officer Kevin Gavin.

Media.net has focused on the episodic television market. Two seasons ago its first Digital Dailies customer was Party of Five with Family Law and the short-lived Big Apple coming on board the next season. “We proved ourselves with an intentionally small number of customers, and now we’ve turned on Vancouver and Toronto and seen significant momentum,” Gavin reports.

Digital Dailies are part of the workflow at Sony, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., Raleigh Studios and Laser Pacific in Los Angeles as well as at Toybox and Rainmaker Digital in Canada. TV shows taking advantage of the process include The Education of Max Bickford, Family Law, Smallville, the mid-season replacement A Young Person’s Guide to Becoming a Rock Star and the MOW The Brady Bunch Goes to the White House.

“A few months ago we decided to move into features,” Gavin notes citing work on a major Hollywood feature based on a ‘60s TV show. “We’re confident we’ll see a significant number of features in 2002.”

With the Digital Dailies process, the telecine facility encodes the master to Avid OMF files and to MPEG-2 files and posts them to the Media.net server.

The next morning the Avid editor can download the OMF files to his or her workstation through the Edit System Dailies application. In parallel, executives arriving at the office can log on to Digital Dailies, which are streamed off the server.

“They all have much earlier access to the material and don’t have to shuffle tapes,” Gavin points out. “And the video, which has been encoded at 3 MBps, is far better than VHS dubs. Family Law tells us they can catch problems earlier because of the improved video quality.”

Digital Dailies and Producer’s Cuts offer the ability to start, stop and move randomly within the video content. It also offers creative collaboration via notes, which are logged and synchronized to timecode for review by subsequent viewers.

Media.net will continue to listen to customers’ needs for enhancements and feature tweaks to take Digital Dailies to new levels, Gavin says. Right now the company is pushing for global access. “A major project is underway to launch satellite capabilities for worldwide connectivity, especially for short-term, on-location productions. We’re also offering microwave wireless and free space optics as an alternative to fiber for the last mile for locations difficult to get fiber to or for use as a temporary solution until fiber is installed.”

Media.net is also working with telecom partners to provide greater fiber access in more cities.

Editvu
Editvu, announced at NAB 2001, is an online digital video delivery application designed for reviewing, storing and distributing streamed digital video for digital dailies, edited cuts, asset management and on a subscription and/or pay per view basis.

The system was originally developed as a value-added service for clients of Editvu’s originator, Chick, Inc., a Hollywood-based advertising and marketing company that primarily services post production accounts, reports president Chick Ciccarelli. After successful beta testing, Editvu began to garner attention for its flat monthly fee and its support of QuickTime, Real Video and Windows Media formats.

“We didn’t intend to go farther than our client base, but those who saw Editvu in use called us, so we decided to market the product,” Ciccarelli recalls.

Editvu uses an IP to IP address delivery of compressed content on high-powered servers equipped to stream the most popular Internet viewing formats and distributes it through a distinctive interface.

The system is directed by a sophisticated hybrid of HTML, Javascript and Perl coding that serves entirely as an online application. The system enables users to review material from anywhere via an Internet connection.

Editvu’s Industry Package base station comes with a password-protected 16-bin access panel, each with its own Editor’s Workshop, Screening Room, Library (for short term uploads) and detachable asset management Vault (for completed projects that are ready for distribution). Each bin is individually password-protected and uses an anonymous numbering system that allows studios, production companies and post production houses to rotate bins as editing projects begin and end.

The back-end structure is composed of an advanced “Synchronous-When-Optimal” routing service that streams media around congested public and private exchange points on the Internet. At the heart of the operation is a multi-terabyte, scalable SAN incorporating Fibre Channel technology that maximizes data transfer speeds while preserving integrity of the content with RAID 5 security in addition to an automated tape backup system.

Current Editvu clients include ABC Daytime, The Disney Channel, Keep Me Posted and LA Digital facilities as well as producers at Ogilvy & Mather/NY. Many independent producers took up Ciccarelli’s offer of free service in the days following September 11 when air courier service was suspended.

A number of Internet-related companies have approached Ciccarelli about possible market alignments and product bundling. A bandwidth-on-demand feature is in the works for those who have IntelliSpace as their ISP. “Users will be able to upload digital dailies with the punch of a button from DSL level to OC24,” he explains. “This also opens up the possibility of taking uncompressed material as well.”

For the first quarter of 2002 Ciccarelli is readying a consumer distribution point called WebChannelz.com, which uses Editvu as its programming engine. “This field is right on track but still in the beginning stages,” Ciccarelli notes. “The idea of stealing digital video content isn’t a big issue anymore, and we can process digital video pay per view with digital time keys but we’re still dealing with connectivity issues. Bandwidth has expanded but not everywhere.”

Avid throws hat into digital dailies ring
TEWKSBURY, Mass. — Avid Technology plans to deliver a next-generation dailies solution in the second quarter of 2002. The yet-to-be-named product is a reviewer application that incorporates an Avid media player to eliminate the need for editors to encode their media before sending it to reviewers. Avid expects to announce the product at NAB.

“We built a digital review system [NetReview, first introduced in fall 2001] for circulating sequences for feedback from reviewers and collaborators,” notes Karin Monsler, product manager for Avid’s Work Group Services.

“Shortly after releasing the product, our customers started asking for something similar for dailies. I think we’ve come up with a great solution.” Avid’s new product is designed to stream dailies around the studio lot. “Customers will be able to use a bandwidth provider or satellite system of their choice to get the media to the lot,” Monsler points out. “Then the Avid dailies product will allow editors to edit and executives to review dailies as soon as the media hits the lot.”

In developing the product, Avid responded to studios’ requests. The studios were especially vocal in telling Avid they didn’t want to encode dailies to a Web resolution, typically a time-consuming process that creates potential security leaks. “Ideally, they wanted the same media they’d be editing on: Avid files,” Monsler says.“Since those are big files, we expect customers will initially run dailies on a corporate LAN.”

Avid’s new product will take advantage of the company’s popular Avid Unity shared storage network. “There is only one piece of media, and the new dailies product streams that media to the desktop with access control and encryption. The integration is strong and there is greater security because there are no MPEG copies to be accessed,” Monsler explains.

The new digital dailies product “leverages Avid’s proven technology, which our customers are already familiar with,” she says. “We think it will be a well-received solution, relevant not only to feature film studios but also to anyone who works with offline media resolution.”

Monsler believes the events of September 11 have “driven the adoption of digital review systems a little more quickly. Digital solutions offer many advantages, but it’s not a replacement for person-to-person contact. It’s an alternative to use when it makes sense. We had a good response to our NetReview product, and we believe interest in our digital dailies product will exceed expectations.” — C.B.

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