CG Pundit

$150 million production,Benjamin Button, was post-produced almost entirely within Director Fincher’s offices in Hollywood. His last project ‘ Zodiac ‘ convinced him to go ahead and use a completely tapeless digital HD workflow from camera to final output for this film. I have posted a brief workflow for the movie based on an article that i happen to stumble upon on the Apple Site ( FCP was used for Editing) that i thought could be handy.

The film was entirely shot on

Cameras
* Viper FilmStream Digital Cinematography Camera
* Sony F23 Cinealta Camera


Hardware
* Mac Pro
* MacBook Pro
* Mac mini
* Cinema Display
* s.Two digital field recorders
* s.two i.Dock
* AJA KONA video card

Software
* Final Cut Studio
* Xsan
* Shake
* Monkey Extract
* IRIDAS FrameCycler

Services

* PIX (Picture Information Exchange)

Benjamin Button FX : this is a comprehensive info site on how the effects were done in this brilliant movie
Workflow

Production: The film was shot digitally with dual Thomson Viper FilmStream and Sony F23 CineAlta cameras using Zeiss DigiPrime and DigiZoom lenses in 4:4:4 format over a 145-day shooting schedule in New Orleans and Montreal. All slow motion photography off the continental U.S. as well as sailing scenes were shot on 35mm film. Fincher had immediate full-resolution playback on-set to check takes and adjust lighting or art direction as necessary.

Ingest: The DPX Footage from the set in New Orleans was cloned onto LTO3 tape. For editorial, the DPX files were loaded on D.MAGs into an S.two i.Dock, which, acting like a virtual deck, batch captured the clips in real-time and played them out through HD-SDI video output through AJA KONA cards into Final Cut Pro stations where they are compressed as DVCPRO HD 1080/23.98 dailies.

Logging information generated on set was imported as an XML file into Final Cut Pro, which allowed eventual matching of metadata between the DPX and DVCPRO HD QuickTime files.

The editorial files were loaded onto Firewire hard drives and air-expressed daily to Los Angeles, where they were backed up and loaded onto a 60TB Xsan.

Edit: In an edit suite in Fincher’s production offices, DVCPRO HD dailies were edited in Final Cut Pro and posted as H.264 QuickTime movies on PIX (Picture Information Exchange) for director review.

VFX: Outside visual effects shops produce DPX files that are compressed to DVCPRO HD QuickTime movies and easily cut into sequences in Final Cut Pro. Effects traffic and integration was managed by only two in-house employees.

Conform: Monkey Extract was used to pull the original uncompressed DPX media from LTO3 back-up tapes, which were conformed using IRIDAS FrameCycler to match the edited sequence from Final Cut Pro.

Output: Conformed DPX files were delivered to DI (Digital Intermediate) for final color grading.