HD For Indies

Indie Film Live is a blog about the production of a VFX heavy movie called Spoon. Their about section reads:

On this site we intend to document the behind-the-scenes the technical aspects of the creation of a modern effects heavy independent film. The film being show-cased is the feature Spoon. Various companies will contributing to the discussion, lead by Atomic Visual Effects, CineForm, and Wafian.


...but most of the writing appears to be by David, as in David Newman, CTO of Cineform, not at all your average film geek.

Interesting reading for the Windows crowd - the Cineform codec is very high quality (Dust to Glory was filmed out from original HDCAM compressed captures) and offers some good options (such as a compressed 10 bit codec).

It goes into lots of geeky details about settings and stuff.

It also includes coverage of the Wafian recorder in action - Wafian is essentially a DDR (digital disk recorder) that uses the Cineform compression technology. They ran it out of the back of a car off of a UPS to get 15 minutes of recording at a time.

Desperate indie garage hack? Yes, but it totally works....in bursts (just turn off the damn "I'm unplugged!" alarm!).

: )

-mike