The pandemic and quarantines of the last few years have seen a radical transformation in how filmmakers collaborate with remote stakeholders and post-production. However, even before this all kicked off, Frame.io worked on integrating no set workflows more closely to post, hiring Michael Cioni to head up the effort.
The end result of this activity is C2C, short for Camera to Cloud, which allows filmmakers to send their files straight from the camera up to the Frame.io platform automatically as they go.
It's a magical workflow, but how easy is it to implement? We borrowed the necessary hardware from Frame.io for a few weeks to find out.
The Basics
The basic setup is this. You attach a Teradek CUBE 655 to your camera. These little units are very similar to the common Teradek bolt, but instead of attaching to a wireless receiver, they attach to the WiFi network of your set.
They can take either SDI or HDMI video from your camera and then create H.264 clips that they automatically upload to the cloud via WiFi directly, and no computer is needed after setup. They can even get roll/cut "flags" from the camera to automatically create these clips when the camera rolls.
Setup on the Frame.io side is surprisingly easy. You go into your Teradek settings, pair your hardware with Frame.io, and that's it. From there, you just roll shots, and they upload.
We had our Frame.io open on a laptop on set, and shots would just populate. For something so technically complicated, it very much felt like it just "worked" after the setup phase.
The real hurdle in this wasn't workflow. It was the internet.
C2C really depends on having a robust network connection. This is something most sets want anyway, so that you can email clients and download lookbooks and, in general, do all the things you need to do to keep a set running. But it becomes extra vital if you are running C2C.
We were working on a stage with less-than-reliable WiFi and found it to be a major frustration that the WiFi cut in and out (not just on the Teradek but also on our laptops). Good reliable internet has always been something to check for on a tech scout, but it's more important now than ever if you have a remote workflow depending on C2C.
Camera Integration
Right now, the best camera integration comes from ARRI, RED, and high-end Sony cameras like Venice. These cameras not only automatically get roll/cut flags over SDI, allowing for automatic clip creation, but they also get filename metadata flowing over SDI into the Teradek. This means that when you roll on your first shot of the day on A camera, if it gets named A001_C001, so does the file on Frame.io.
This is the real killer feature of the system. Your editor sitting in the post suite, who has hopefully integrated Frame.io into their Premiere, Resolve, FCP, or Media Composer workflow, starts to see shots appear with the correct filename right in their NLE without having to do more than refresh a drive. But most importantly, these shots will have the right filename for relinking later.
On set, the media still gets downloaded to raw media drives, but there is no need to generate dailies or ship these raw drives. They can be stored securely and then brought out again only at the end of the edit when needed to relink for color and mastering. And since the filenames will match—easy peasy, your shots will relink.
If you are working with a camera that doesn't support that metadata, you can have someone on set sitting in the Frame.io session renaming files to match the camera files, which works, but isn't nearly as slick and easy as having it happen automatically.
Supervising Your Footage
One thing to watch out for is that this will remove a vital step from the workflow we've had for a long time—getting to make tweaks to your dailies.
Of course, on set you should be watching your image closely to make sure everything is as good as it can be. But sometimes things do happen, and we've all enjoyed the opportunity to make a small tweak to our footage when we get to dailies from time to time. Never forget, your reputation is made as much in your dailies as in your final grade. Clients spend weeks and months staring at your dailies, and a shot that is too dark in the edit will negatively affect their opinion of you, even if it looks amazing in the final grade.
C2C is wonderful, but it means losing that dailies session, and that means paying closer attention on set to ensuring your image looks the way you want it to in real-time. You'll want to do more testing of in-camera preview LUTs, and you'll want to stay closer on top of your in-camera menu settings than ever before.
It's not impossible to imagine changing these more throughout a shoot to ensure dailies "look close to right" than you might on a job where you get a dailies session.
This even affects indie productions, where I know many indie and up-and-coming DPs who manage their own dailies on smaller productions to ensure that they are being set up correctly and look as good as they can before going to editorial. Working C2C, this is something you'll have to make sure you are dialing in on set.
Not a problem on a larger show with a dedicated DIT, but something to be aware of.
Timecode and Sound
If you are running timecode sync between your camera and your audio recorder (and you should), and your audio recorder supports C2C, your audio files will also flow effortlessly into the cloud.
Currently, this functionality is primarily limited to higher-end equipment, specifically units like the Sound Devices 633. From what we can tell, Frame.io is open and excited to work with the widest array of devices possible, so we're hoping it rolls out more widely in sound recorders, especially the more affordable units you'll often see on independent productions, like the MixPre II lineup of recorders.
Conclusion
There have been workflow solutions for automatically getting your footage straight from your camera to post for a while now. The key innovation here is just how simple Frame.io has made the integration.
Something that could have been difficult to set up is now just slightly more complicated than logging into WiFi, especially if you are used to working with Teradek hardware, as most every filmmaker is.
Our big hope for the future is continued wider adoption with support for more hardware choices, especially in sound, to make the workflow more accessible even to independent productions.
