Getting the day’s Work Product back to Post is never a straight forward task. The common method of shipping tapes or drives can experience delays caused by weather, errors in shipping instructions, damaged packages, Customs, or a bad recording medium. Often problems aren’t discovered until days later, and then the process needs to be repeated successfully. Security can also be a problem during transit, as the data is touched by many hands that aren’t well known. But, even if the process goes perfectly, there is a significant lag in time before it is known whether or not the transfer was successful. This process can takes days, specially if the transit crosses country borders. The bottom path in the following diagram shows that the typical minimum time for the frames to be made available at Post is 36 hours for 2.6 TBytes of Camera Raw or DI produced at the Set.

A much more reliable method for getting the day’s shoot back to post is via the network. Historically, this has not been an option, because the data sizes are too large and/or the network pipes have been too small. By incorporating Pixspan Data, though, this barrier can be removed. Pixspan Data compresses the day’s Frames using the Bit Exact Round Trip™ software to create replicas of the original frames, making Camera Raw 40% to 60% smaller, and Digital Intermediates 50% to 80% smaller. This allows 2.6 TBytes of frames to be sent over a 1 Gbps line in just 3 hours, with the time to see the first Frame at less than a minute.