San Francisco, Calif. - Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) used Tweak Software's RV as its image and sequence viewer of choice, helping the company streamline stereo 3D visual effects reviews on Transformers 3.
RV helped enable stereo dailies review, collaborative reviews between its Singapore and San Francisco studios, and remote stereo reviews by director Michael Bay in Los Angeles.
"Transformers 3 was unique in that we were working with a wide array of media, both film and digital, spherical and anamorphic, with the final result being a checkerboard of native stereo and dimensionalized media," says Nigel Sumner, ILM digital production supervisor. "RV gave us the advantage of being able to review all of our imagery in a single application and in multiple locations simultaneously."
"It was vital for us not just to play back dual stream stereo in real time, but also manage stereo convergence and color correction, and in addition, to easily be able to switch between 2D and 3D viewing in real time. RV gave us that flexibility," adds Mike Morgan, ILM's manager of media systems engineering.
More than 300 artists, as well as production staff and the director, used RV to review work in progress. ILM replicated the San Francisco dailies pipeline for the crew in Singapore, and relied on RV's remote sync features to enable teams in both locations to review and play media while annotating comments.
ILM also set up RV remote review for the filmmaker in Los Angeles via a secure connection to RV at ILM in San Francisco. "RV enabled us to mix different media types and organize media into sessions. That was key and RV was a central part of the remote review solution," explains Sumner. "When the director requested the reference or annotation for any given shot, RV allowed us to navigate across different media and quickly pull up what he was looking for."
"RV has become a fundamental part of our pipeline, hands down," says Sumner. "Its extensibility has allowed us to integrate it into our pipeline fairly easily. It's our primary viewer and its integration is becoming stronger every day."