“Digital Domain has artists, facilities, and partners all around the world. Our goal was to create a unified and universal user experience for watching dailies and conducting collaborative reviews. Artists can be at their desks doing one-on-one reviews with colleagues at other locations, or in conference rooms or in screening rooms doing group reviews. Anything is possible,” said Digital Domain technology project manager Ryan Mayeda. “With RV and RV-SDI we were able to create that experience not only within studios, but across them, remotely. It’s like having one big screening room.”
RV enables easy review of images and sequences through a flexible dailies workflow and an advanced media architecture that can automatically combine media of different resolutions, frame rates, color spaces and audio sampling rates. RV-SDI provides dual link SDI output with embedded audio to handle 2K stereo playback/review in screening rooms and theaters.
While artists at Digital Domain had been using RV for desktop playback, the studio had a different solution for its screening rooms. “Tweak adding support for SDI was the missing piece,” said Mayeda. “SDI is the only way for us to watch 2K stereo. It feeds into the projector effortlessly and you get perfect, artifact-free playback. RV also has a number of nice features for stereo viewing, allowing supervisors to make stereo adjustments live in the screening room.”
Digital Domain also tapped RV’s open API and SDK to integrate RV with its proprietary DMX dailies system. The result is a seamless experience for users during dailies whether they are all together in one room or remotely connected from different facilities. “One of the key reasons RV was such a good solution for us was because it’s extensible by our developers. It gave us everything we needed to easily link it into our dailies system,” said Mayeda. “And now that RV is going to support Python, it’s going to get even easier!”
RV and RV-SDI are fully integrated into the pipeline at Digital Domain’s Venice and Vancouver studios and were used recently for digital production on Thor, X-Men: First Class, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Real Steel.
On Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Digital Domain even set up a remote system with fast connectivity to director Michael Bay’s office, so he could use RV to review work, draw, annotate, start and stop playback, and talk to artists and supervisors via videoconference. RV deployment is in initial phases in the studio’s Florida and San Francisco studios.
