This was the year digital technology lived up to its hype – boosting efficiency and driving down costs at picture and sound post-production companies across Canada. The pros report that going digital has finally made life, and business, significantly easier.

For example? Digital dailies. ‘Instead of print dailies going through the lab every day, and the crew reviewing them in a theatre, the ability was given to them this year to economically and easily view high-definition dailies,’ says Izhak Hinitz, president of Eyes Post Group in Toronto.

His company co-developed a system to deliver HD dailies on DVD while working on the MGM action picture Bulletproof Monk, which shot in Toronto this summer. The studio was ‘ecstatic’ with the results, says Hinitz.

Early investment in digital technologies has also started to pay off at Rainmaker Digital Pictures in Vancouver. ‘We’ve been buying equipment to prepare for the onslaught of high-definition for years, and this year we finally saw it come to fruition,’ says president Bob Scarabelli. ‘It’s made a significant impact on how we do business and what equipment we use. More and more shows are now either capturing in high definition or transferring to HD format,’ he says.

Rainmaker also minted a digital dailies system in 2002, and now delivers footage directly to desktops via the Internet.

‘It allows us to move images around much more cost-effectively. It also has a collaborative tool…so I can send a daily from my desktop to a producer in L.A., and he can add notes and send it back. It provides a much cleaner, less costly communication process,’ says Scarabelli. The streaming dailies improve on Rainmaker’s older VivX- and intranet-based system.

‘The big technology news this year is that the stuff actually works,’ says John Gajdecki, owner and visual effects supervisor at Toronto/Vancouver-based GVFX, pointing to his company’s new ‘very, very fast and efficient’ Intel-based 3D boxes and to the rise of Intel-based 2D compositing systems.

But cheaper hardware is a mixed blessing, he adds, because it is now easier for new companies to start up. Steeper competition is ‘definitely impacting the bottom line,’ he says.

GVFX changed this year from SGI- to Intel-based hardware, following successful test runs on the leaner, cheaper machines in 2001. ‘We switched our whole render farm over to Intel chips,’ says Gajdecki. ‘We’ve got 30 render boxes, each with 2GB of RAM, so that’s pretty big. We’re almost exclusively Intel in the 3D department now.’

He says Intel hardware is threatening industry mainstays such as Discreet. ‘I got tired of my artists coming to me and saying, ‘My machine at home is faster than the one here at work.’ That’s cute the first time you hear it, but after a few months of it you go, ‘Okay, I’ll buy you some new gear.’ So we’ve been able to update pretty much all our workstations.’

Discreet, despite turning out superior software, has priced itself out of the market, says Gajdecki. The next 2D machines he buys will be something cheaper, possibly from Nothing Real (Shake) or eyeon Software (Digital Fusion).

‘I pity the guys who invested in infernos and flames,’ says Rob Power, vice-president of Halifax-based Salter Street Digital, which four years ago started a move towards NT- and Intel-based PCs. This year, he says, PC technology surpassed that of supposedly high-powered Unix boxes. ‘A $10,000 PC can do some pretty high-end effects that just a few years ago were impossible on any platform,’ he says, citing software such as PixelMotion and boujou. ‘Maybe the render takes a bit longer, but there’s easy solutions to that – just build a render farm.’

Patrice Cormier, VP of HD development at Buzz Image Group in Montreal, concedes that a fleet of PCs can, in some cases, match the results of Discreet equipment, but he does not believe that to be the case with the speed. ‘It’s quite difficult to get the same results,’ he says. ‘It’s quick response, if there’s a client on your back – that’s where Discreet really stands out.’ Especially for posting commercials, he offers. ‘You can make changes on the spot. You don’t need to send it to the render queue, you just see it. That’s what you’re paying for.’

Buzz uses some PC hardware, but also bought a new Discreet fire/inferno combo on an Onyx 3000 in April. ‘There’re not a lot of choices out there to do what Discreet is doing,’ says Cormier.

Discreet spokesperson Kevin Clark adds, ‘there is a big difference between slow growth and losing to competition. Are we losing market share? The answer is no.’

Discreet is, he adds, diversifying its systems and software to stay ahead of the competition.

But digital still has drawbacks. Salter’s Power is less than impressed, for example, with digital capture. ‘We’re posting two movies right now that were shot in digital PAL,’ he says, ‘and I’m not a big fan of someone shooting a million-dollar movie on a $2,500 camera. It doesn’t do it justice.’

Geoff Turner, president and GM of Pinewood Sound in Vancouver, also has one or two reservations about digital. The harsh economics of the past year have, he says, prompted many filmmakers to post their projects at home on high-end desktop computers. That’s a great money saver, he says, but it’s no replacement for a seasoned sound editor.

‘Up-and-coming directors don’t trust the people who have been doing this for a fair length of time,’ he laments. ‘The word ‘experience’ doesn’t seem to count anymore.’

-www.eyespost.com

-www.rainmaker.com

-www.gvfx.com

-www.buzzimage.com

-www.pinewoodsound.com