SOURCES / REFERENCES:

SMOKE & MIRRORS

Ruth Mamaril Editor

Y&R

While working on a :15 sec V8 spot out of Y&R, New York, promoting the company's donation of over $1.000.000 to "Feeding America" the Snorri Bros developed a revolutionary new workflow.  In the past the Snorri Bros have done several projects involving digital stills where they've shot RAW files with Canon digital cameras.  The management of the media becomes a bit of headache on those jobs when, at the end of a shoot, you may end up with 10.000 RAW images.  With the assistance of long time collaborator Aron Hjartarson, Lead Creative Director / VP at Method Studios NY, the Snorri Bros developed a proprietary software pipeline that logs RAW footage and generates matching movie clips for offline use, ready before the days' shooting is wrapped.  When the offline is approved, the software auto-conforms the RAW files using an exported EDL and the conformed edit is finally delivered to the post facility as a sequence of high resolution DPX files.

It has been a long term goal of the Snorri Bros to figure out a workable solution for this problem as it has often become a bit of an issue in post how to best handle the RAW files from the still cameras as they don't conform to the standard equipment in the post suites.  

But why shoot RAW? 

Snorri Sturluson answers that question: 

"The quality of the RAW files from the Canon cameras that we usually shoot these kinds of jobs with is so superior to the JPG format so we started that a while back.  Most people advised against this because of the problems it introduces in post but we had an idea of how that could be done.  It took us a few projects to finalize and complete the method and the software we wrote for this purpose but now it's pretty solid and turned out to be an amazing asset on the V8 spot where we first really implemented it.  It was a good thing it worked so well as the schedule of that job was impossibly tight, we had 3 days for offline and 3 days for post.  So we really didn't have time for long transfer and conform times."

"The beauty of our pipe line" Sturluson continues "was the the editor, Ruth Mamaril at Filmcore had the dailies in her hands instantly after wrap as the offline files were being logged and created on the set.  Once the offline was approved it was a breeze to locate only the necessary RAW files and spit them out as DPX sequences for post.  Done deal."

It was Smoke and Mirrors in New York that did the post and they were quite happy not having to conform after the offline as they didn't have much time for the post all in all and were able to focus on the creative.

Because of the short timeline of the job Young & Rubicam, New York were pleased with the speedy delivery of everything and felt comfortable in the capable hands of the Snorri Bros and their associates.

Tennille Loevenguth broadcast producer at Y&R had this to say about the project:

"Working with the Snorris, we found the process of the production to be completely seamless. They infused dynamic creative ideas and brought so much to the table for this project. We appreciated their involvement with the project through to the end. The agency felt that they went above and beyond to ensure the best creative end product possible. We look forward to the next project we can work on together with them."