Category Archives: Video Production

Cloud Can Impact Almost Anything, As Same-Day Dailies for Movie Shoots Shows

Aframe, a cloud video production platform company, announced that Laboratory in New York used Aframe’s professional video management service to deliver dailies of the soon to debut indie film “The Birder’s Guide to Everything” literally the same day – a breakthrough for global film and TV production teams. In the fierce competition to achieve stunning creative, Aframe’s ability to ingest, store, transcode, and deliver a link to a full day’s high-res footage to a 20-person team, in just hours let the artists focus on their art. After years of teams tolerating the delivery of raw footage from location shoots via overnight shipments a day or two later, Aframe’s private cloud finally made the term “dailies” true to its name.

A quirky coming of age film featuring Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley, “The Birder’s Guide to Everything” is a feature-length adaptation of the 2008 short “Aquarium” by director Rob Meyer, which won an honorable mention from the Sundance Film Festival. After spotting what he thinks is an extinct duck, a high school sophomore and bird enthusiast persuades two dorky buddies and the “new girl in school” to join him on a quest to locate the mysterious bird. Adventure ensues as the teen comes to terms with painful aspects of his family life.

During 21 days of shooting north of New York City, post house Sixteen19 processed and uploaded dailies to Aframe where they would be securely stored and accessible to all authorized team members. Within hours, a link to an H264 proxy copy of the footage was emailed to 20 collaborators on the film. This avoided the costly, time consuming practice of shipping HD disks overnight would arrive the next day or later, often too late to make fine yet vital adjustments to potential for costly-reshoots.

Using Aframe, Laboratory now had an easy and efficient means for everyone to view each day’s raw footage and make important decisions on production or acting nuances immediately with the next day’s takes. Collaborators could access footage anywhere, anytime, without the need for dedicated, costly on-premises systems, with one co-producer even viewing dailies on his iPad while working in Qatar.

“I’ve been waiting for this type of solution for a decade, and to me Aframe is simply genius,” said Dean Winkler, co-founder of Laboratory and post-production and VFX supervisor for “Birder’s Guide.” “Digital storage is a huge problem, with everyone throwing valuable hard drives into some carton in an insecure back room, which are painful and time-consuming to sift through and store, let alone share. With Aframe, we store the master in a secure cloud and let everyone look at H264 proxies immediately and at their convenience – making better use of otherwise idle time and getting the footage out when it can make the greatest impact.”

“We’re creating this film on a tight budget, and Aframe not only saved us money distributing dailies but was also a far better solution than using physical media,” Winkler continued. “Once you use Aframe, I can’t imagine you’d ever want to go back.”