Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 26, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
From The Dark Knight—the second film in history to pass the half-billion-dollar mark—to The House Bunny, most of these films involved several Avid systems. These included Avid Media Composer systems, the Avid DNxHD 36 codec and Avid Unity MediaNetwork for video editing and networked work in a central-storage environment; Digidesign Pro Tools for audio editing and mixing; Sibelius 5 for composition and scoring; and Softimage|XSI for 3D animation, design and effects.
“Our customers continue to delight cinema audiences around the world, using our integrated media tools for their creative work,” says Gary Greenfield, CEO of Avid. “With the impressive features of our products, our customers set clear standards across the industry. Today and in the future, Avid delivers precisely the open and flexible solutions they need to realise their creative talent and fulfil their dreams.”
For the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, the team led by Lee Smith, A.C.E., used a workflow of Avid editing systems and Avid Unity central storage to give the action effects a dark, thoughtful nuance. The project was made more complex by the team’s need to produce an IMAX version in addition to the conventional theatrical version. Initially the team worked with 16 video tracks for different elements, but this approach soon became unwieldy when handling content for two versions of the film. A colour-coding process using a common Avid timeline was therefore developed so the IMAX version and conventional theatrical version could be created simultaneously. “This produced an almost seamless process in which we could simply switch back and forth between the two vision tracks,” Smith explains.
For composer Hans Zimmer, writing the score for The Dark Knight was also more complex than his work on earlier projects. With literally stacks of proprietary sample-playback machines producing hundreds of output signals, only Pro Tools|HD could meet the multitrack recording requirements. “In the final version we worked with more than 1,000 tracks, which presented us with an incredible organisational challenge,” explains Peter “Oso” Snell, Zimmer’s technical score engineer. “We used five Pro Tools systems for playback and a sixth for recording. Pro Tools allows us to stream and mix a large number of tracks while using a range of TDM processing. As an extremely solid platform, we can rely on the Pro Tools hardware—we simply know it will work when we press Play.”
For the computer-animated live-action film The Incredible Hulk, four editors worked with six companies to handle 667 effects shots, 400 of which involved computer-animated characters. Both the Hulk and his opponent, the Abomination, were created with SOFTIMAGE|XSI software. The film’s sound was mixed with Pro Tools hardware.
To handle the complex edit, the team connected nine Avid Media Composer Adrenaline systems to an Avid Unity MediaNetwork with 17 terabytes of central storage. This allowed the four editors and their team of assistants to access the media simultaneously and work directly together on the projects. The footage was shot on anamorphic 35 mm film, and the filmmakers chose to edit in HD using the Avid DNxHD 36 compression format. This allowed the creative team to view the visually demanding material offline while benefiting from an optimised, storage-efficient editing system.
The use of HD material also helped optimise the entire screening process, both for previews of the dailies and the complete film. During production in Toronto, for example, the editing team created a reel of selected scenes in Avid DNxHD 36 format and delivered it on a FireWire drive to a facility with its own Avid installation and a large display for viewing dailies. “This made it very easy to view and discuss all the material directly,” explains editor Rick Shaine, who had never worked in HD before. “From the outset, we could capture and edit the complete image. We could show every enormous pore, every twitching muscle and every styled lock of hair exactly as the filmmakers wanted. For a film production, that means a gigantic task—entirely appropriate for a superhero like the Hulk.”
For Journey to the Center of the Earth, shot in 3D, leading Quebec 3D company Hybride created a number of the film’s objects with SOFTIMAGE|XSI, including the dinosaur skull, giant carnivorous plants and magical glowbirds. The software was also used to create several virtual environments, among them the diamond chamber, the volcano and a hot river. In total, an 80-person team at Hybride spent more than 15 months working on the film’s 234 3D scenes.
Philippe Theroux, Lead 3D Supervisor at Hybride, explains the production conditions: “One of the things that fundamentally makes our work easier is SOFTIMAGE|XSI. It is the centrepiece of our Hybride pipeline, around which everything revolves. Every aspect of our workflow is handled with XSI, and we have to ensure that all our software is compatible with it.” The Hybride team uses XSI for everything from modelling to surfacing and rendering. The software is naturally also used extensively for animation. Theroux continues: “All the animation tools in SOFTIMAGE|XSI are extremely useful to us. For this film in particular, we were able to create rigs that our animators could use easily and comfortably, which was a major advantage for these complex scenes.”
Hancock, starring Will Smith, was also edited on Avid systems. The film’s score was composed by legendary film composer John Powell and his orchestration team using Sibelius software, then mixed in Pro Tools. Lead orchestrator John Ashton Thomas says of working with Sibelius: “Among the Sibelius 5 features I find especially useful and time-saving are the filter functions and the ability to change the appearance of rhythmic groupings in MIDI files. I use Sibelius for all film-scoring projects and for all my own music.” In addition to Hancock, Powell and his team used Sibelius for the scores of numerous successful films, including Kung Fu Panda, Horton Hears a Who, The Bourne Ultimatum, X-Men: The Last Stand, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Happy Feet, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Italian Job, Agent Cody Banks and Shrek.
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