DVD Dailies: Creative Collaboration for Feature Film Makers

Executive Summary — Film and sound media are essentially linear, and the process of recording performance or documentary images and sound are likewise linear in their essence. Of course, we may selectively choose to turn the camera on and off to compress time and to conserve media materials during subsequent editing. — But the collaborators in film projects relate to the materials in a non-linear way. The photographer, director, costume designer, producer all may have specific needs to view captured images, sounds or meta-data and may wish to navigate through media in differing and customizable ways. — In this special report, the author(s) will give a brief history of the filmmaker's traditional production and post-production process using examples of film “dailies” and historical photos. The author(s) then will present a new approach employing DVD as a universal non-linear and interactive media tool for those working on film and video projects. As DVD is in its infancy, we will explore some potential benefits of the medium and propose basic architectural concepts for DVD authoring in this application. — By simulating the process of making feature film dailies, this concept of using DVD instead of tape was investigated. This report will describe the results of these experiments, and the exact configuration and equipment used will be described. During the telecine process, the video and audio were captured to Betacam tape, as before, but the signal was also fed into a MPEG-2 video encoder and an audio encoder and captured to disc. These files were imported into DVD authoring software using templates and macros to accelerate the process, and a DVD-R was burned for delivery to the director. While it normally takes up to a week, or about 40 working hours or more to make a DVD, for this application to succeed, it can take only about 2 hours after the telecine transfer was completed to have the disc ready for review.

Published

1999-11

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00343

ISBN

978-1-61482-931-7