DMN: It's not in real time, but you don't need that just to hold your footage so you can take it back with you.

Chiolis: Yes. Let's say you've set up for a shot, you're going to make three of four takes of that shot. Maybe you've shot three or four minutes. Maybe it takes you 4X to stream that out to the backup. But it may take you an hour to set up for your next shot. We don't think a few minutes extra is that big a deal if you're just sitting around.

DMN: This unit must have a lot of disk space in it! I guess I could do the math, but...

Chiolis: It's about 500 gigabytes, for the 45 minute unit. It's a lot of disk space. It's called HD Reel, also made by The Director's Friend. It has a handle, and it's very portable. You can actually run it off batteries if you'd like. In all of our setups we can run the HD Reel, the Cine Console, I have a Sony Dual Link monitor so we can monitor the entire signal coming off the Viper, and the Viper all on one single 20-amp circuit. So it makes it really nice and convenient, you just run one cord and you're all set. The signal from the Viper to the Director's Friend will go about 300 feet if you wanted to do that. So you can keep it in a different place, and put it anywhere you want. It's very quiet, you can actually keep it on set, and not have to worry about it.

DMN: What kind of cables do you need to connect the Viper to a disk recorder?

Chiolis: It's standard HD BNC cable. We have a little snake with three cables in it, two for standard use and one for backup if something happens. It's three-quarters of an inch around.

DMN: So in your testing so far, you've used it for what -- feature films, shorts, commercials, green screen/blue screen work? What is the bulk of productions that you're using this on and what sort of results have you seen for each one?

Chiolis: What's we've done so far is a short, and everything's still in finishing. We've filmed out some bits and pieces of tests, but we haven't sat down and filmed out an entire finished product yet. We should have that done in the next two or three weeks. There are two products that are finishing currently. One of them was a short that they're trying to get into a film festival over the next few months. I think the have a good shot at it. It's by an actor in one of the Disney TV series who wants to direct.

DMN: "What I really want to do is direct," right?

Chiolis: (Laughs) Yes. So he actually assembled a good-sized crew, and as a principal actor, he got Richard Moll, Bull from Night Court, who's actually quite good in the role. He was a lot of fun. So we shot that about two weeks ago, they're in offline right now.

DMN: So step me through the procedure. They shot it, brought it back in the Director's Friend, and then what did they do with it?

Chiolis: They took it into our Spectre Virtual DataCine. You can transfer real time from the HD reel through the Director's Friend console to the Spectre using the HD-SDI cable, so it imports into there. At that point you match up the time code, synch the audio, and then make your dailies/window burns from that. The camera will either shoot 16:9 or 2:3.7. You can switch that ion the CCD natively. Because we're oversampling, we have the capability to utilize the full resolution with in 16:9 or 2:3.7. So we're not losing anything bouncing between formats.

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