Just wanted to give everyone a head's up that Spoon has now successfully wrapped shooting (as of last Friday), and is now officially the first film to shoot with the Silicon Imaging camera system. With over 130 hours of shot footage across 62 production days, they've really put the camera system through it's paces, and showed the production community that it really does work in the "real world" and is more than just a concept.

We've got more goodies on the way! :)

You can read a great article about the "Spoon" shoot and some comments from Simon, et. al. at:

http://digitalcontentproducer.com/cameras/revfeat/field_test_hd_072506/

Cool!
Who do I kill to see some full-sized images for now and then who do I kill to see the movie when it's done? :)

130 hours of footage!

Thats about as much coverage as a micheal bay film.

Congrats. How many TB's of disc did that take up and how are you backing everything up?

Dean

I believe they're just using off-the-shelf hard-drives for backup.

at 40GB/hr, I'm guessing it's quite a bit of space :)

5.2TB to be exact.

Of course the nice thing is that since Cineform RAW doesn't need to have a high-speed disk array, it's not like you need to carry around a super-fast/very-expensive RAID . . . you can just have a bunch of Lacie big-disks, or whatever and edit directly off those via firewire800 or eSATA.

I presume they'll be doing an off line edit first.

No need to-do an "offline" edit . . . the AVI files only run at 12MB/s, so it's sort of like editing with something like DVCProHD, although the Cineform RAW codec is much, much better (it's a full-raster, 10-bit, 5:1 compressed wavelet based codec).

You can drop it straight into your timeline, edit with up to 4 real-time streams (CineForm was demostraiting this on a dual Opteron 275 Boxx workstation at NAB in the AMD booth), and this is all off simple off-the-shelf hard-drives.

There's no more need for "offline"/"online" with CineformRAW . . . that was the whole point of the codec, to free yourself from that very cumbersome workflow. You can maintain the RAW file integrity all the way from aquisition to final post and distribution.

Since a realtivley nice system (i.e., Pentium D and beyond) can do real-time editing with the code straight off a normal hard-drive, there's no need for "offline"/"online" workflows anymore. Just record and edit, and in the case of Spoon, have a lot of storage . . . but it can be simple firewire800 or eSATA drives, like the Lacie Bigdisks, it doesn't have to be expensive XserveRAID's etc.

Congrats to both the producers of Spoon and the SI guys. The production blog and sample clips posted really look great.

Shot in 62 days and you've kept 130 hours? That's alot. What's the expected TRT?

howzit

yes, we are done with principal photography on spoon - we're cutting the whole movie in on-line mode on prem pro 2 - which is going to be somewhat of a challenge. Cineform performed really well as did the cameras - we really put them through there paces and had very little problems (we even shot underwater stuff - hahaha) i'll be around on forum regularly now as I'm editing the film together with simon and we'll be trying to further develop the whole process during post with cineform and silcon imaging. There is around 8 months of post to do on spoon so its a lot of work.

ciao
sharlto copley

It says a lot that a film with a likely nice production budget used a relatively untested camera (the SI) to make the movie. Very nice, SI guys!

heath

Curious as to why Premier Pro2 is presenting a challenge?

There is around 8 months of post to do on spoon so its a lot of work.
Now that it's May 2007 (about 9 months later) I'm just wondering how the post-production is going? Any anticipated release date?

Now that it's May 2007 (about 9 months later) I'm just wondering how the post-production is going? Any anticipated release date?

A good question although with that amount of footage I could imagine it's quite a task.
I did notice in many of the shots they had two cameras rolling so that would account for the high shooting ratio.

I think they are planning a Christmas release.

In the meantime, the cameras have been busy shooting another feature called Discreet:

http://discreetdiaries.blogspot.com/

BTW, I've just uploaded a new video file that demonstrates some of the blue-screen compositing work that the AtomicVFX guys are doing on Spoon.

You can download it from our video gallery at www.si-2k.com

Thanks,

Jason

I think they are planning a Christmas release.

In the meantime, the cameras have been busy shooting another feature called Discreet:

http://discreetdiaries.blogspot.com/


Are you guys renting the cameras or what's the deal?

We are not renting cameras directly, but there are some rental houses on our list of pre-orders to be part of the first production run of cameras. The SI-2K will be released at the end of June/beginning of July, and is currently in the begining stages of production (i.e., we are starting up our first production run/assembly of cameras for the June/July delivery date). So things are right on target.

You can contact Steve Nordhauser for information on where to rent a camera once they have been delivered. His number is (518) 279-9098.

The AtomicVFX guys are behind "Discreet", so they are using the same cameras they purchased from us last year (that is the first prototypes we had at NAB last year that they used to shoot "Spoon") . . . so their cameras are still working :)

They have not received any of the new camera systems from P+S Technik that will be a part of the first commerically availabe production run in late June/early July.

Curious as to why Premier Pro2 is presenting a challenge?

I'd like to know also. I Prefer the Adobe workflow with Premiere Pro to Final Cut any day. I've used both for just about every format.

I'm guessing this guy has never used PPro2 before or just doesn't know any better.