DMN: So once you've put it out on the dailies, synched with sound with the window burn, you're able to edit that. What are they using for editing?

Chiolis: They're using an Avid to edit that offline, like you would anything else. And then they'll take the EDL that comes from the Avid and input that into the Spectre, and it will do an autoconform at full resolution. Then you go ahead and color time it and then output either to film or tape, depending on what you're looking to do with it. We're kicking around a couple of ideas for archiving. It's a little expensive to buy a lot of HD reels and store those. But we're working on either archiving on D6 tape, which is one of the formats we make, or DTF tape which is the Sony format. Or we're also considering the potential of buying a lot of little off-the-shelf hard drives and storing it there. One of the ways we've been internally moving files around came by accident. I wanted to look at files one day and I don't have a $700,000 Spectre in my office. I had them bump off a few files to a USB-2 drive. They're standard DPX files. I plugged the drive in, and voila! I can view DPX files on my computer. I can manipulate them, I can color correct them, I can do whatever I want with them. So for about $250, you're getting 120-gig USB-2 drive, and that holds about ten or eleven minutes of uncompressed data from the Viper.

DMN: So could you do some color correction there, get your numbers and take them back to the Spectre?

Chiolis: I don't know if they're going to translate. But in Photoshop you could convert the DPX files into a Photoshop file, do some color correction there, save it and then take it into your color session and say "this is what I want it to look like." One of the discussions we had on set was, should they take Polaroids, should they grab a frame within the computer and attach that? We were still doing script notes by hand on a pad. But the script supervisor had lots of ideas as the shooting was going on, like, it would be really neat to have like an electronic book or a tablet computer with a touch pad you could write on, and her idea was you could download the script onto this, and then capture images and paste thumbnails of them next to the script and then make your notes there as well. We're not there yet, but it's got her mind thinking that maybe that's a good way to do things.

DMN: I find it interesting that with this new technology, there's a whole new set of tools that go along with it that present other marketing possibilities as well.

Chiolis: I agree. Another idea we came across -- and the jury's still out on this one -- do you delete files? We came across a take, a couple of hours into the shoot, and we had gotten about halfway through it and there was a bad camera move or someone flubbed a line. So we thought, OK, do we just delete this and clear space, or do we leave it there? We know we're not going to use any of it. But it's that feeling that, what happens if there's some little piece of that shot, where in the edit session, I decide I want to use and it's gone? Then what happens?

DMN: You're SOL.

Chiolis: Yeah. What do we do with this? They deleted a couple of things and then they decided, no, we're not going to delete anything any more.

DMN: Yeah, I get scared erasing things like that.

Chiolis: I agree with you.

DMN: You never know. In the edit session, sometimes the craziest things come out of a shot that you never thought you could use. Like maybe an extra shot you could wedge in between, that could help continuity.

Chiolis: So the idea was, don't throw anything away, because somebody will want it.

DMN: And disk space is cheap, too -- everybody says "tape is cheap," well, you can now extend that to the disk as well.

Chiolis: Right.

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