LONDON — Pinewood Digital, the front-end dailies division of Pinewood Studios Group, is a pioneering user of FilmLight’s Daylight system and recently extended its investment in the platform with new installations in both London and Atlanta. Daylight is a near-set dailies management tool that embeds grading decisions to create high-quality dailies and other deliverables.
Based at Pinewood and Shepperton Studios in the UK, and from a North American base in Atlanta, Pinewood Digital handles dailies on-location across the globe for companies such as Disney, Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios. Following its participation in the beta test program, Pinewood Digital bought its first Daylight licences as soon as the product was released in late 2015. Daylight provides a single-point service for ingest, archiving, grading and rendering for editorial and online review. The studio now has close to 20 licences.
“Before Daylight, we had to build our own dailies tools, because there wasn’t anything on the market that did what we needed in a cost-effective manner,” explains Thom Berryman, head of Pinewood Digital International. “We are big users of Baselight, and when we found out that FilmLight was developing a dailies tool, we were very interested.”
Luke Moorcock, technical projects supervisor at Pinewood Digital, emphasized the effectiveness of collaboration with FilmLight. “The two-way communication between us is always open. We put the Linux version through some tough tests, for instance, and if we have a new feature request we can get straight to the development team and explain precisely what we need and why.”
With Daylight, looks can be pre-set and loaded in advance. The system provides the full Baselight grading capability to help directors and DPs establish looks and visualise their shots. In a single package, Daylight imposes camera LUTs, accepts grading decisions, allows further look development and meets all sophisticated deliverables requirements, including syncing and playing back audio.
A unique benefit of Daylight is that it is part of the FilmLight BLG render-free workflow, allowing grading and other creative decisions to be carried from one Baselight system to another via metadata, ensuring that the latest grade is always visible and all changes are captured. Much of Pinewood Digital’s projects go on to be graded within Baselight, but where other grading systems are used, metadata can be exchanged using the CDL format.
Daylight 4.4m1 is currently available. Version 5.0 of the software – which brings next generation color to the dailies process - will begin beta testing shortly.