Web tech splices filmmakers' global divide

Like most global team efforts, the story features off-hour conference calls and a lot of email trickling in overnight. But for a small digital-effects house like San Francisco's Giant Killer Robots, it also meant sending large, bandwidth-hogging digital video files to the director's company, Animal Logic, in Sydney, Australia.

That's not an easy task when you're a little company that can't afford fibre optic lines into the office. But if an innovative joint university-government project works out, global filmmaking teams like the one behind Happy Feet -- due in US cinemas 17 November -- could have an easier time getting their jobs done.

A small group of engineers in San Francisco is developing a Web browsing tool for use over a high-speed fibre network that would allow animation and film producers to co-produce a movie in real time. The application, called Sebastian, would work over a dedicated, point-to-point Internet connection, or so-called dedicated light paths, and would let remotely located artists do things like mark up frames, edit video and change colour palates as if they were in the same room.

It would make a huge difference to smaller outfits like Giant Killer Robots. When the two Happy Feet teams were collaborating over broadband from different time zones, using a QuickTime video editing tool called CineSync, the video clips were more like watching a YouTube clip than a high-resolution wide-screen shot, making it hard for the director to form an educated opinion. That sometimes painful process, suffice to say, slowed the filmmaking process.

"It's a two-cans-and-a-string-in-between-them kind of problem. You're really trying to break down the walls of globalisation. And it all depends on really wide pipe," said Pete Oberdorfer, co-owner of Giant Killer Robots.

Sebastian is under development at the Digital Sister Cities Lab, a research and development team that's part of San Francisco's Digital Sister Cities Initiative (DSCI). DSCI is focused on connecting cities and promoting economic development through advanced technologies.

One of the major goals of the organisation is to get high-speed fibre connections beyond universities and big companies -- who are right now about the only people who can afford them. By first working with data-intensive businesses like film companies, they hope to begin seeding a market and sparking demand that will eventually convince big telecommunications companies to decrease their sometimes dizzying fibre line rates.

In other words, build the market, and just maybe the carriers will come. Of course, it won't be easy, but the DSCI researchers see their project in two parts. First give filmmakers the tools to collaborate remotely. The second, and probably more difficult step -- give them the high-speed network to make real-time collaboration possible.

"Cisco and (Industrial Light & Magic) can burn thousands of dollars to create infrastructure themselves," said Oberdorfer. "Companies (like us) don't have that option. As this progresses, we see it scaling so that anyone can get access to it."

A key to this project is the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), which operates California's high-speed fibre network for education and research purposes.