Assimilate DIT Station

Recently I was talking to a professional DIT friend of mine. As you know the DIT (Digital Image Technitian) is a position between cinematography and postproduction, a technician who performs (among others) postproduction and color correction work on set. He mentioned Assimilate’s DIT Station to me, explained everything it included and the truth is that I found it very complete and very useful.

Right now, the DIT is asked to perform multiple tasks from different departments, and without the appropriate means, this work would be impossible to carry out in a timely manner. Therefore, the fact that there are “briefcases” like this one makes their task possible and, of course, easier.

The DIT Station offers a wealth of possibilities to bring post-production closer to the set. It includes two Mac OS X laptops and Assimilate’s Scratch software, plus the Red Rocket acceleration card, which decodes .R3D files for real-time playback. The advantage of having two computers is that it is possible to use one of them without interrupting work on the other. For example, we could be decoding the files and storing them in hard disks in one of them and, at the same time, we could be playing the ones we already have in the other laptop. It should be noted that it has the capacity for real-time playback of files of any format and color space up to 5K.

These options would allow us to ingest the material and view it on the set itself, but there are many more possibilities. We can also approach the world of editing, since we can synchronize the audios, make conforms of the scenes or even convergence adjustments in S3D.

As you know, the figure of the DIT and the director of photography are quite linked in a shoot, and it is here where the DIT Station can be more useful and that will allow to take a step further. By having Scratch on set, you could make primary corrections or apply (non-destructive) LUTs on the spot. The cinematographer can see very soon after shooting how the image is coming along in terms of exposure or color, so if he sees something he doesn’t like he could start changing it right then and there, without the need for the footage to get to the editing room first. He could also start doing some color grading tests. Of course these corrections would not be the definitive ones (which would be done in postproduction with a color corrector), but they could be very useful previews of what the final material could be.

There are three models available, Tornado, Hornet and Raptor, the latter being the most complete of them all. The main differences between them are the memory cards used and the available connection ports and inputs.
The Tornado model supports the SxS and P2 cards and the Hornet, the 1.8″ Red Mag; the Raptor model has both.
The types of connections available are USB, Firewire (although the Hornet model includes only one input while the others have two), eSATA (also not available on the Hornet model), SDI and DVI (the latter two will only be possible on the Raptor and Hornet models).
From the end of the year it will also include an HDSDI output, which allows the export of uncompressed digital video in real time. This will make color correction with Scratch possible on a calibrated 10bit monitor.

Another quality that I find very practical is that all three models allow you to work with any camera, whether Arri, RedOne or DSLR.

As more technical features:
– It has an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), which in the event of a power outage would allow a backup and keep the computers on for up to twenty minutes.
– Includes a 4TB NAS, allowing the two laptops to share their storage capacity.

I have been looking around the internet and, in case you are interested, I think you might find it here.