DriveSavers Data Recovery has successfully recovered the Academy Award winning film The Shore. Produced by the father and daughter team of Terry and Oorlagh George The Shore is a 30-minute film about an expatriate Irishman returning home for the first time in 25 years. It won the Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Film. For a time it appeared the preferred version – the director’s cut – might be lost.
The director’s cut was the version that was used to create several other versions of the film using Apple's Final Cut Pro. Producer Oorlagh George explained “We edited the film to an airplane friendly version another for television with cuts for commercials a shorter film version for film festivals and then there was our prized Director’s Cut.”
Shot completely in digital format the producers stored all the various versions of the film on a MacBook Pro laptop computer that was configured for automatic backups. At some point the MacBook refused to boot up for some unknown reason. When the files were finally restored it was discovered that the critical director's cut version of the film was missing.
The father/daughter team experienced their data loss only days before the 84th Academy Awards Ceremony in Los Angeles California. No one in the audience or the nearly 40 million television viewers could tell how worried the pair was about their film when they accepted their first Oscar for Best Live-Action Short Film.
We went to the Oscars-and we won George said. Since the drive was in transit to DriveSavers we weren’t sure we would get the version of the film back that we really wanted people see. But after only two days DriveSavers rescued the irreplaceable director's cut along with family photos and notes for future projects.”
George summed up her experience by saying We are so grateful to the kind people at DriveSavers they are just amazing. I would use them again in a heartbeat...but hope I never have to. ,3326
Spin VFX Purchases Katana Site License,2012-05-31, Spin VFX has purchased a site license for The Foundry’s Katana and will now be using the software on all its future projects. Spin VFX is the first mid-sized studio to purchase Katana. The company has integrated the Foundry’s software both during look development for asset creation and then again as the lighting tool at the end of the pipe. Spin VFX did many of the effects on Breaking Dawn Part 1. Colin Davies VFX supervisor at Spin VFX says We are excited to implement Katana as it provides both the stability of a larger facility pipeline and a significant increase in efficiency for a medium company such as ourselves. Katana is a major component that is facilitating our continued growth as a company. It's much more than just lighting software - it's an advanced pipeline tool that offers power and flexibility. We also use it to more easily handle large complex scene files and most importantly update our assets more efficiently. Katana is an opportunity to adopt some of the best practices developed by dedicated R&D teams at leading visual effects studios.” Originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks Katana takes an innovative recipe based approach enabling facilities large and small to build highly scalable and efficient lighting pipelines without a large internal engineering effort. Artists can define and control look and lighting while maintaining performance with very large datasets. Katana operates non-destructively using a rule-based approach that allows modeling look development animation and lighting teams to work in parallel. ”More and more facilities are discovering the benefits of adopting Katana in their pipelines. We are delighted to have Spin VFX on board ” says Andy Lomas Katana product manager. “The adoption proves that Katana is not exclusively for larger studios but has many benefits for growing houses.” “Katana makes our pipeline a far more advanced offering ” says Davies. “We are now able to compete for a broader spectrum of work. It does this in a number of ways. Firstly it gives us the ability to have a script based workflow which lets us scale well on projects with big shot counts and lots of similar set ups. Secondly handling shots with large data sets becomes simpler. There is much less effort needed to break up files and update them on an on going basis as Katana only loads the data you need when you need it.” Katana 1.0 was released in October 2011 and is already in use in production at Industrial Light and Magic Digital Domain and Sony Pictures ImageWorks. Katana continues to be under evaluation at a number of studios both large and small. Spin VFX www.vfx.com The Foundry www.thefoundry.co.uk
DriveSavers Restores Oscar-Winning Film The Shore
