Digital Workflow for Dailies

Control Dailies is the only complete solution for digital and film dailies processing.  Our turn-key system handles every step from hand-off to delivery.  Our complete feature set means that there's never a need to trade off power for usability, camera support for output format support, or any stakeholder's needs for those of another.

Pre-Production

While the term "dailies" brings to mind hours of exacting work overnight, every night, successful high quality dailies begin during pre-production.  With support for so many types of deliverables - tape, DVD/Blu-ray, even online streaming - each production has the opportunity to specify a set that will meet their unique requirements and Control Dailies ensure the post house can deliver. 

Our template-based burn and slate generation allows for definition of the exact set of project data that will be included in each deliverable at the start of the project... and they ensure the results are accurate and consistent from night to night.

No Camera Left Behind

Control Dailies supports all popular cameras - from traditional film, through popular tape-based cameras such as the Genesis, Viper and CineAlta, to emerging leaders in digital file cameras RED, ARRI and Panasonic.  Our modular architecture allows new camera formats to be easily integrated into any base installation.  

Because Control Dailies utilizes the format-agnostic MTI Film ImageStore, users continue working with the same core tools for audio-image sync, color correction, project data management and QA, regardless of the originating camera.  In fact, thanks to this neutral architecture, Control Dailies can combine film, tape and dile based material on the same timeline.

Digital Acquisition

The rise of digital cameras has brought many benefits and many new challenges for every step of production and post - including dailies.  Control Dailies offers the processing power needed to decode any of the dominant formats (RED, ARRIRAW and Panasonic P2) in real time or faster and the scalable architecture to allow facilities to support any and all formats on a single installation.  

Integrated color correction ensures on-set looks are maintained and facilities can provide the same quality output as with film dailies.  And with all available deliverable formats supported, regardless of the input, Control Dailies offers a flexible, future-proof choice.

Television

Leverage Control Dailies' project management features even more for episodic television shows.  Templates can be re-used from episode to episode and even season to season, ensuring a long-lasting relationship with productions regardless of whether they are shooting on film, tape or in the middle of that transition.

Digital Intermediates

A successful dailies session should be the start of a strong digital intermediate process.  Control Dailies provides a complete dailies processing system, with incredible attention to detail, metadata accuracy and quality control. 

Control Dailies exports metadata for editors in ALE and DNxHD files and editorial deliverables can include the primary color correction or not, depending on the facility's preferred workflow. Colorists can use the color decisions applied during dailies as a starting point thanks to export as a LUT or ASC CDL. 

Sound Sync

The fastest and most intuitive toolset for automatically and semi-automatically determining sync relationships for audio and picture are in Control Dailies. 

Sync audio to the precision of 1/100th of a frame and enter metadata quickly and accurately with metadata entry fields that increment intelligently but never get saved without an operator approving the values. 

Audio can be pre-logged or post sync'ed and finding the close of sticks has never been easier - an intuitive GUI, automatic waveform analysis and cueing to common timecodes when present make it a breeze.

Color Correction

Control Color is designed for dailies.  A trackball interface has hot-keys for recalling color-active stills, 3D LUTs and timeline navigation. 

Each still in the still store is tagged with scene and take metadata, plus the color metadata and they can be recalled within a project on any day for immediate comparison and retrieval of a grade. 

All color correction is applied on output during tape layoff or encoding so color decisions never require rendering or extra disk space.

Output and Encoding

Control Dailies concurrent architecture generates all the deliverables in the background, automatically throughout the dailies session.  So shortly after the Colorist and assistant approve the last event, all tape- and file-based deliverables are ready.

DVDs and Blu-ray discs are output as fully authored disc images with chapter stops for each take, rather than a mere hour long stream with chapter stops at random points.  Optional integration with a Rimage disc burner and labeler covers the whole process to completion.  

Avid DNxHD files are generated ready-to-edit - MXF-wrapped with audio, while online dailies delivery is supported by both the Windows Media 9 format and QuickTime/MPEG-4 files that are pre-parsed for instant upload to the PIX System.

Deliver!

Unfortunately, in many facilities there are still multiple steps between the completion of a dailies session and the actual delivery of the dailies output.  Control Dailies with Convey helps eliminate these wasteful tape dubs or transcoding steps needs to get from where you are to where you need to be.  

Beyond just offering a wide array of output formats for all audiences, each format has been optimized to eliminate wasted time and effort.

With Control Dailies, you'll deliver the highest quality product on time, every day.