“Dallas” Chooses MTI Films’
Remote Control Dailies
January 13, 2012
Source: MTI Film Warner
Horizon Televisions’ reboot of the nighttime drama Dallas has become the
first production to take advantage of MTI Film’s Remote Control Dailies service
to ensure secure, high-quality dailies while shooting on location in Dallas. Remote
Control Dailies offers the same complete feature set that MTI Film’s Control
Dailies provides in a facility setting, but configured in a portable unit for
use on-set or near-set.
Installation of Remote Control
Dailies in Dallas was overseen by MTI Film’s David McClure. “Basically,
our technician arrived Saturday morning and had a post facility set up inside
their production office by that afternoon,” McClure says. Remote
Control Dailies allowed the Dallas production team to reduce costs and operate
more efficiently. “We prefer to keep our dailies and finishing at the same
facility and it was always our intention to do the Color for the series at MTI,”
explains Bryan J. Raber, the show’s Associate Producer. “Shooting on
location and shipping the drives back and forth to Los Angeles presented a number
of the usual issues: the time lost to shipping, the costs, the uncertainty of
canceled or delayed flights and security risks.” Remote
Control Dailies offered the solution to all of these concerns. Because the dailies
are processed near location the production doesn’t experience any of the
typical delays. iPad and editorial deliverables are ready for pickup in both Dallas
and Los Angeles by 8 a.m. the following day. The cost for both the equipment and
staff is actually less than the cost of shipping would have been. Most importantly,
Raber points out, “The footage never leaves my hands. I have complete control
over where it goes and when.”
Processing
the dailies near set makes it fast and easy to drop in additional shots or re-takes.
Additionally, MTI partnered with T-VIPS to provide a video-over-IP solution using
JPEG 2000 compression that allowed the DP to sit in on every coloring session.
In a flip of the usual remote color session, both MTI’s dailies colorist
Troy Davis and final colorist Steve Porter can work directly on the footage stored
within the Remote Control Dailies system in Dallas from the Hollywood location
at any time.
Dallas is shot on
ARRI Alexa, with Remote Control Dailies processing up to 6 hours of footage
each day, including ingest, audio-image synchronization, metadata collection,
coloring and creating the file-based deliverables. While the footage is synched
in Dallas and colored remotely from Los Angeles, Remote Control Dailies automatically
encodes several outputs in the background - a ProRes proxy for editorial, fully-authored
DVDs for the studio, and two H.264 files, one uploaded to dax|D3 for production
and a 720p chaptered file for the iPads on-set. The editorial media is sent to
L.A. electronically so it’s available to the editors first thing in the morning. Raber
has nothing but praise for the Remote Control Dailies system and service provided
by MTI Film: “It’s been a really great experience, I’ve really
enjoyed it!”
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