Interview | Directors Cut Films

MARK:

I’m Mark Manning, I’m the managing director of Directors Cut films in the middle of London, Oxford Circus. As a company, we deliver Ultra HD features, documentary programs on the arts, entertainment shows, and reality shows. The reality shows tend to be the faster-turnaround shows, where we’re delivering late changes right up to transmission.

Before seeing the Cinedeck in action and cineXtools, we were locked into the final file. So if there was a need to modify in any way, the only option was to recreate it, which is obviously time-consuming. So the ability to edit into the file we’ve created was revolutionary, really. It meant that we didn’t need to QC a file again, the insert; we could just check before and after the insert, the QC can happen relatively simply, and we can redeliver almost immediately.

The new cineX plug-in is the next generation of integration of the product into our workflow.

ANDY:

Traditionally, the one thing you can’t change is durations in AS-11 files. It’s very hard to do, whereas cineXtools has been able to do that from the get-go. So most systems would rely on the source timecode matching your master file timecode, but with cineXtools you can manually mark an in and out point to drop into a matching in and out point, even if the timecodes between the insert and the master file don’t match. That’s very handy.

The attraction to us with Cinedeck, was the hardware integrates into a traditional machine room. One of the big advantages we’ve got here is that because there are two channels on the deck, we can do simultaneous layback and QC off the same file. That does make a significant time savings in terms of QC and delivery of files.

MARK:

Prior to incorporating Cinedeck into our workflow, whilst exporting a file, we had no way of ascertaining that the file was correct. And thus if we get to the end and find there’s an issue with it, we have to start again. But now that we have the Cinedeck in the workflow, we can live create files; have a team of people watching the file editorially; we can have the on-line editor watching it to make sure all the bits he’s done are correct and in the file; we can have a QC operator making sure it’s technically correct whilst the layoff’s happening. And the ability to edit into files very quickly and confidently was an absolute benefit to clients, which means we’re adding value to the process.