Case Study: “Deadgirl”
“Deadgirl” premiered at Toronto International Film Festival as the first independent production to use a completely tapeless digital production method. Pomfort SilverStack helped the filmmakers to realize a flexible, professional workflow with the best image quality.
Deadgirl is a controversial, innovative horror movie that was shot in a block of just a few weeks using a digital Thomson Viper camera. Harris Charalambous (DOP) set up a completely new digital workflow inspired by the tapeless digital workflow presented just a few months earlier with Fincher’s Zodiac. With the use of Pomfort SilverStack all steps of the workflow could be operated on Mac-based desktop systems while maintaining the highest level of quality that a theatrical feature film can demand.
The movie was shot in an anamorphic format at a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels to utilize the full pixel raster of the camera’s sensor at an aspect ratio of 1:2.37. The Codex Recorder stored the FilmStream output as uncompressed DPX files. The originals of each day’s shooting were transferred to external disks (RAID 0) for further processing, as well as to LTO 3 archive tapes for disaster recovery (see workflow diagram below for more details).
Workflow for Deadgirl: Pomfort SilverStack and Cinemator creating Dailies and providing QC
Pomfort SilverStack and Cinemator were used to create QuickTime™ movies of the source material (including three stereo sound tracks from WAV/BWF files) for editorial and quality check. The software’s various settings such as resolution, frame rate and codec have been used in presets for the for the creation of Dailies. SilverStack maintains the 10-bit color depth of the source files, handles metadata from source file headers, file names and folder structures and maintains timecode information in visual burn-ins and time code tracks for Final Cut Pro.
“Once the decision was made to shoot digitally, we were dissatisfied to find that most tape systems could not record the full picture quality that the cameras were able to output.”
Harris Charalambous (DOP)
The production team chose the visually lossless ProRes codec by Apple in a HD resolution of 1920x1080 pixels for editorial, which reduced the storage demands for offline editing in Final Cut Pro from 40 Terabytes (TB) of source files to about 2 TB. Conform and final color correction was done in Assimilate Scratch based on the hires DPX source files from the external hard drives without having to go back to the archive tapes.
With this workflow Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel from Hollywoodmade could produce and direct Deadgirl successfully without having post-house involvement or renting expensive IT equipment. Although the workflow was originally considered too risky for studio films, Pomfort could help the filmmakers to develop a streamlined and reliable but yet flexible workflow with the best image quality possible.
“Having QuickTime movies as Dailies with detailed burn-in information such as DPX sequence file names and timecode amongst other information was crucial to us. It helped us reference back to the hires uncompressed DPX source files and visually confirm that the shot and in and out points of each cut were correct during the final conform.”
Harris Charalambous (DOP)
Info
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Shiloh Fernandez, Noah Segan,
and Michael Bowen
Music by Joseph Bauer 2008, Running Time: 101 Minutes DVD available at amazon.com |
Links
- Millimeter, “Going Tapeless”
- Viper FilmStream Camera
- Codex Recorder
- Assimilate Scratch
- Harris Charalambous, DOP
- Hollywoodmade
"Case Study: Deadgirl" (PDF, 7.3 MB)
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