Digital Film Direct-to-Disk with Viper FilmStream
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DMN: So what you're selling in addition to higher quality is flexibility here. There's actually more data to work with because it's not going on to tape, it's not being compressed. So you have a lot more range there.
Chiolis: Exactly. You hit the nail right on the head. We also believe in its ease of use. One of the things with a lot of the cameras that are being used for 24p, everybody has a different setup card, everybody has a different look, everybody wants to tweak the shot before it goes down, because once it's gone down, yeah, you can do a little bit of color correction on the back end, but you've locked in most of what that shot's going to look like at the shoot site. That's not the place to be locking things in. You're not in optimal lighting usually, your monitors might not be optimal, because a monitors that get moved around on a constant basis are going to drift, people can get in there and tweak them. If the cinematographer decides he wants to put a "look" in there, and on the back end, they decide, well that wasn't the right look, it's going to be tougher to get out of that later. What we're saying is, just capture whatever's there, and then deal with it on the back end. A lot of people like that because we're continuing to keep the DP -- the cinematographer -- and the colorist together, and that's what's made film so great in the past, the coming together of the two technologies really makes for a great image.
DMN: So what about the cost? What is the suggested retail for the basic package?
Chiolis: The retail on the Viper is $100,000. That's the camera and the output pack. And then the recorder, we've been using The Director's Friend, but there are other companies that are looking into making this type of product as well.
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DMN: Can you tell me briefly about The Director's Friend? How much disk space it has, how much you can record on it, how it's being used -- do people get ten of them and take them on a shoot?
Chiolis: We're still going through the testing and knock-out phase as well, so we've been working with them. One of the co-developers of it was a person who owned a film studio in Germany for a number of years, so he came from the film background, and he developed it for him to use. About two years ago, he sold his business, and went into this full-time and has been concentrating on it. There's two parts to the system We're trying to call it CineFS or just Cine, rather than Director's Friend, because the Directors of Photography don't like the name Director's Friend.
DMN: They want it to be their friend.
Chiolis: It's the DP's friend.
DMN: So this is a product sold now by Thomson, but not developed by you?
Chiolis: No, we're not selling it. It's sold by Director's Friend, which is the company name. They are partly owned by DVS. They make high-end capture cards and things, as well as servers.
So, there are two parts to it. There's the console part, which looks like a Yamaha portable piano, and it sits on the same kind of X-frame that you'd sit the portable piano on. Inside that is the dual-link capture card, software and then some additional hardware, as well as audio inputs, audio outputs, timecode outputs, user bit outputs, we're working with them on metadata outputs, and then there also some limited color correction within the software. With that, you can take the stream from the Viper into the unit, take a look at it, and add a bit of color correction so you can get a better idea of what the picture will look like once it's color corrected.
DMN: Is there some sort of default color correction that you add with this unit to overcome the fact that the green gun absorbs more light?
Chiolis: Yes, there's a standard lookup table that that they have applied to that. If you want to color correct further from that, you could, in very rudimentary steps. But by no means would it be considered final color correction.
DMN: It's a field-viewing device.
Chiolis: It's a field viewing device, and it works great for that. And then you can also output a standard 4:2:2 for your dailies, you can do that. If you wanted to output a standard definition signal, you can do that as well. Most everything we've done has been dual system audio. You can either feed a mixed-down version of the audio to the Director's Friend console or you can just keep it dual system and then we can synch it up in post. The other part of the system is the recording device, and that looks like a small computer tower. There's three versions of that. There's the version that will hold 25 minutes, there's one that will hold 45 minutes, and then there's a backup version that's slower than real time and holds 90 minutes. So workflow is designed such that you would capture on set, and either in between takes or when the reel is full, you could back this up to the version that holds 90 minutes, while you're setting up for the next take. So you always have the information backed up.
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