cineSync news

The latest issue of American Cinematographer magazine has an extensive article on the use of cineSync in post production on The Dark Knight.

"I used [cineSync] from Hong Kong, Chicago, LA, London and Paris", says Dark Knight VFX supervisor Nick Davis. "Wherever we were, I was able to stay in contact with the director and the vendors. It really makes the world a much smaller place."

The new Eddie Murphy movie Meet Dave, about a spaceship that looks like Eddie Murphy being piloted by a miniature Eddie Murphy, is a necessarily VFX driven comedy. VFX Supervisor Mark Stetson (Superman Returns, Lord of the Ring: Fellowship of the Ring) worked with LA based VFX houses CIS, Hydraulx, Pixel Magic and Make VFX (among others) to deliver the shots. cineSync made communication between all the facilities quick and easy.

"Although we worked entirely with L.A.-based VFX studios, and our post production offices were in L.A., we used cineSync nearly always for dailies and shot reviews" says Stetson, in an interview with VFX World. "That saved us hours in traffic each day. There were key meetings and final reviews where we did get together face-to-face, but cineSync covered about 95% of it".

When Frantic Films' two Canadian divisions (Winnipeg and Vancouver) were selected to create more than 130 shots for the new Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D feature film, they relied on cineSync to effectively communicate visual images between locations.

In an interview with Post Magazine about the various challenges of creating the shots, Frantic's Randal Shore said that "Frantic's two locations communicate as freely as if they were across the hall from each other using cineSync".

For the latest vision of the The Incredible Hulk, director Louis Leterrier worked with VFX facilities Rhythm and Hues, Soho VFX, Image Engine and Hydraulx, spread between LA, Vancouver and Toronto, while the shoot was split between Canada and Brazil.

In order to effectively co-ordinate the distributed VFX team, while on the road, Leterrier found the simplest solution was cineSync - "with CineSync it’s so easy".

cineSync is increasingly being adopted for audio post production in film, television and animation. An article from Post magazine highlights cineSync's role in the post of a recent animated film Turok.

From the article:

“We all had the same QuickTime on our desktops and anyone could hit play or stop and we all could see it. So, we could have a meeting about the show and we did not have to be in the same place. It’s like a spotting session that takes place in 10 different places at once. If that didn’t exist, then I probably would not have been able to work on this job.”

Today sees the release of cineSync Pro - the ultimate synchronised review and approval solution.

Expanding on the hugely successful and widely adopted cineSync, cineSync Pro takes interactive, real time reviews to another level and is fast becoming an essential part of production and post production pipelines the world over.

Today sees the release of cineSync 1.2.7, with a number of new features and improvements.

The new update is available for free to all cineSync customers.

Rising Sun Research announced today that Montreal's Meteor Studios employed its cineSync remote review and approval tools and cineSpace color management to streamline workflow and keep quality consistent during visual effects creation for the highly-anticipated 3-D movie, Journey 3D. The movie, from Walden Media and Walt Disney Pictures, is an updated take on the classic Jules Verne story, where a geologist and his son travel to the center of the Earth and discover an unknown world. Starring Brendan Fraser and shot in live action with landscapes & creatures created using HD, photo-real 3-D technology, the ambitious stereoscopic picture comes to theaters in 3-D in summer 2008.

The Spiderwick Chronicles is a fantasy adventure movie based on a series of childrens' books of the same name. The magical and sometimes dangerous creatures of the books were brought to life by Tippett Studios and Industrial Light and Magic, both long time cineSync users.

Prime Focus London and their Indian sister offices were required to do extensive VFX work for the new feature film Tales of the Riverbank, based on the children's television series of the same name. As the production was based in the UK, Prime Focus relied on cineSync to maintain an accurate communication pipeline throughout the post production process.

Production and post for Columbia Pictures' new film Vantage Point was based in London, but Vancouver based Rainmaker Digital were called on to complete many of the film's complex effects shots. To enable London based VFX supervisor Paddy Eason to easily communicate with the Canadian crew, he utilised cineSync.

Following our release of the cineSync 1.2.4 beta last month, we're today officially releasing cineSync 1.2.4.

The main improvements for cineSync 1.2.4 include support for Leopard on OSX, support for the newer MacBook Pros which fixes some image and drawing issues and improved image saving for Windows users.

When Entity FX were required to create CG elements for the new Sean Penn film Into the Wild, they used cineSync to review material with the picture editing department to ensure seamless integration of their work.

Riot recently delivered more than 80 visual effects shots for The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, a supernatural fantasy released on October 5th by Walden Media and 20th Century Fox. Even though Riot's studios are based only 30 minutes from the Fox offices, cineSync enabled the shots to be reviewed much more efficiently by eliminating driving and parking delays and allowing reviews to be set up at mutually convenient times.

For this year's followup to the highly successful 28 Days Later, the sequel, 28 Weeks Later utilised a number of VFX houses around the world. One principal vendor was Prime Focus, who have offices based in England and India. To enable clear visual communication between the two offices, Prime Focus used cineSync.

When VFX Supervisor Boyd Shermis (Poseidon, Gone in 60 Seconds) needed to set up robust communication between facilities in the US and Germany for the visual effects work on The Invasion, he again used cineSync - having used it succesfully for Poseidon 2 years earlier.

On the recently released Rush Hour 3, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, cineSync formed an important part of the post production process, connecting facilities in LA and Vancouver. Zoic Vancouver's vfx supervisors Randy Goux and Patti Gannon worked closely with the film's overall vfx supervisor, Adam Howard, throughout the delivery process.

As part of our continuous development of cineSync, we're pleased to announce the release of the latest version, cineSync 1.2.3

While most of the changes in 1.2.3 are related to improving overall performance, there are some new features:

• Proxy server support: for users who want to connect to cineSync via a proxy server.
• Auto locating movies: cineSync now remembers the last 20 folders you've pulled movies from - and will auto search these folders when new movies are added to the session.
• Windows colour picker: to match the existing capability of the OSX client.

For the children's feature Charlotte's Web, VFX companies all over the world were called on to create different individual characters to populate Charlotte's barnyard. In order to be able to co-ordinate and review the work at the different facilities, VFX supervisor John Berton Jr utilised a combination of iChat and cineSync, to great effect.

New Features:

• A buddy list: see who's in the session with you.
• A text drawing tool: write notes directly onto a frame.
• Session saving capability: recall your notes from previous sessions.
• Final Cut Pro XML data Import/Export: supply all your notes directly to your FCP editor.
• Refined pencil, circle and arrow drawing tools: better, faster, improved.
• Multi-level Undo/Redo: of all drawing and text.

Rising Sun Research was nominated as the hottest company among 14 technology developers that participated in this year's ANZA Technology Network Showcase conference, held last week at the Plug and Play Tech Centre in the Silicon Valley town of Santa Clara.

Rising Sun Research won the award for its cineSync technology, which allows visual media practitioners - whether they be film, TV, advertising, graphic design or a myriad other fields - to collaborate on digital media in real time, regardless of their physical location...

Rising Sun Research celebrates the first birthday of the world's preferred visual media review tool.

Since its commercial release in November 2005, cineSync has become the preferred software tool in the international film industry for reviewing, annotating, discussing and approving picture edits, visual effects shots, credit sequences and other aspects of post production. An integral part of the workflow of major Hollywood productions such as X-Men: The Last Stand, Poseidon, Superman Returns and Charlotte's Web, cineSync has quickly become the market leading review tool...

"Each person has the QuickTime and cineSync connects them all,' says Hitesh Shah [co-founder and CEO of FrameFlow]. "So if someone goes to 2:37, all the people see the same footage in real time. You can also draw on frames and that metadata is saved. That's been a tremendous help in shot turnover and a great tool for feedback. Whenever you draw on the frame it generates separate image files as JPEGS so you can go back and see the notes and pull up the still frames."--Studio Daily

All vendors used Rising Sun Research's cineSync. "We had QuickTimes of effects shots, cut sequences or jpegs in folders on our computers at Red Sun," Joyce Cox explained. "The vendors had the same material in folders on their side; so we could bring shots up in sync, watch playback with sound, and Mark could stop the image, draw on it, and say, "move this to the left, make this more gray..." That enabled us to manage more than 500 shots out of the country"--CineFex July 06 Issue

The conference calls to L.A. every night were amazing. We showed our work via Rising Sun Research’s cineSync and then discussed the shots eye-to-eye, via a web cam every evening...--VFXWorld

Visual Effects Supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum, DP Gabriel Beristain, and Director Brian Robbins used cineSync to remotely review and approve the digital effects shots for Disney's The Shaggy Dog. "It has probably made me give up satellite transmission systems forever." remarked Stephen Rosenbaum...--Millimeter Magazine

Every day during the last month of production, ILM transmitted shots to studios where Spielberg was working. To make sure they kept getting the approvals, sometimes ILM would video conference at his home via the Mac's iChat AV and transmit files over the Internet. "We have this other program called cineSync where they could download the files off a secure server and we could call him up and use the camera to talk to each other while watching the file."--Post Magazine Online