DVS and ARRI Build Digital Dailies Workflow

DVS and ARRI began collaborating in early 2006 on a digital-dailies workflow using Clipster, DVS-SAN, ARRISCAN and ARRI CMS. The design replaces a video-based dailies process with a digital, transparent path from dailies creation to the final digital intermediate.

Traditional dailies represent captured film material transferred by telecine to HD or SD videotape for producers and directors to review and for offline editing. Selected takes are then scanned again at high resolution to create the final digital master. This requires both a telecine and film scanner, with inconsistent colourimetry and geometry between the systems. Video colour corrections cannot be transferred directly to the high-resolution scans, so the director sees a different image in the DI suite than in the edit.

In the proposed workflow, ARRISCAN handles central film digitisation and replaces the telecine transfer. The scans are stored directly on DVS-SAN for parallel processing. DVS Clipster then creates the high-quality SD and HD dailies required for offline editing.

The high-resolution scans and digital dailies retain matching colour and geometry, keeping editing, colour correction and visual effects in the same look. Metadata accompanies the material throughout postproduction and remains available to the dailies, which can also feed television production directly.

ARRI application engineering head Harald Brendel said the DVS integration extended ARRISCAN and ARRILASER into a system covering digital dailies, conforming, finishing and final film-master output. The complete workflow was scheduled for demonstration at ARRI’s NAB stand.