the super spin

confessions of a pixel pusher

An article about the Superman Workflow. Sounds awesome. I am sure lots of interesting work has gone into this. The title talks about an “all data Workflow”. They used freaking video tape for crying out loud. Digital tape, but still tape.

Superman was a show that some vendors had trouble getting their in’s and out’s aligned with. The Digital Sandbox / panalog solution probably works really well. But it also makes interchange harder than a less elaborate standard. Adding a vendor can not be done as easily as when you ‘just’ exchange DPX files. Worse can be better.

Superman was also the show that had some -shall we say- ‘QC’ issues: Rumor has it, that the images from one of the cameras had flaws that spawned elaborate fixes. From what I have heard these errors had only been detected late in the game. Which would mean that dailies did not do what dailies are supposed to do: making sure that you have in the camera what you want to have.

I think it is a problem if you simple take the traditional workflow and just replace analog with digital. Replace one linear media (film) with another one (video tape). Digital files have a complete different set of attributes than those older linear means to transfer image information.