Remote Collaboration: Technicolor-PostWorks connects three continents
Issue: July 1, 2015

Remote Collaboration: Technicolor-PostWorks connects three continents

NEW YORK — Technicolor-PostWorks (http://www.postworks.com) has been offering flexible remote collaboration services for more than five years. The facility provides a variety of point-to-point and cloud-based options for connecting creative teams located in different parts of the country or the world. It also has access to Technicolor’s robust private network, which links it to facilities in a number of cities across three continents.

“We set up point-to-point sessions that push live images and sound from one facility to another to facilitate flexible review schedules,” explains CTO, Joe Beirne (pictured). “It’s often not possible for all stakeholders in a production to be together for every stage in the creative process; we provide them with the next best thing to being there.”

For the Spike Jonze feature Her, Technicolor-PostWorks’ colorist Jack Lewars worked in tandem with a colorist in Stockholm to collaboratively grade the picture. More recently, the facility hosted VFX review remote sessions from the Bay Area for the Columbia Pictures feature Pixels. That session allowed reviewers in Los Angeles to share their feedback with director Christopher Columbus, who simultaneously viewed the shots from New York.

“Film projects begun at our facility in Manhattan are often completed in Los Angeles with elements updated asynchronously between the two coasts,” says Beirne. “Increasingly of late, we pool media in multiple locations and pass only metadata to render the latest updates between facilities. That is a particularly elegant solution when collaborating on projects in 16-bit 4K and beyond, projects that can strain even a 10Gb/s + VPN.  We leverage the archival requirement to maintain multiple copies of project data in geographically-dispersed locations.”

Successful remote collaborations require reliable calibration of display environments across facilities. “We maintain a network-wide calibration database that assures that the image will be reproduced accurately for every collaborator,” notes Beirne. “This is facilitated by standardized photometric instrumentation in every facility and common reference files.”