NEW YORK — AICE (www.aice.org), the Association of Independent Creative Editors, has released a new series of Recommended Practices governing digital camera masters and the creation of digital dailies. The guidelines, which were finalized after a national survey of AICE member editorial and post production houses, provide agencies and production companies with technical recommendations for digital camera masters and procedural guidelines which clarify and simplify the preparation and delivery of digital dailies to editorial houses.
The Recommended Practices were developed in response to an increasingly complex post environment due to the industry’s rapid shift from shooting on film to digital acquisition, notes Burke Moody, executive director of AICE. “We’ve gone from a format and a workflow — 35 and 16 millimeter film — that’s been in place for 50 or 60 years, to one that’s constantly changing and evolving.
“Digital picture acquisition has turned everything in the post production world upside down,” he adds. “Our Recommended Practices have been issued to help provide some benchmarks for stakeholders to adhere to.”
The document was developed by the AICE Technical Committee and establishes criteria for digital camera masters and digital dailies. It strongly recommends that responsibility for dailies be assigned prior to production to ensure that the dailies are properly prepared and delivered to the editorial house and that the cost to prepare them is included in either the production company's or the post facility's budget. Finally, it warns that failure to provide dailies completely and correctly will result in additional and unnecessary costs to the client, loss of time in the post schedule and delays in the finishing and delivery schedules.
The report was based on responses from 75 editorial houses from eight markets. The AICE Technical Committee that developed the Recommended Practices was headed up by Jeff Drury, technical operations manager of the Whitehouse in New York, and included Clayton Hemmert of Crew Cuts, Knox McCormac of Optimus in Chicago, Justin Lee of 567vfx in Toronto, Carl Jacobs of Splice in Minneapolis and Austyn Daines of Rock Paper Scissors in Los Angeles.