By Beth Marchant

In the world of on-set data management, having a talented DIT on set is an essential part of any successful production. The DIT’s roaming cart or more permanent setup in video village is a critical point in the pipeline, where dailies are screened and readied for the edit and additional post.

It can take an arsenal of solid state and spinning hard drives, computer hardware and monitors, cables and ports to grab all the camera and other data being generated on today’s sets, then swiftly copy, transcode, and share it with multiple post and archival departments. Depending on the camera and post workflow, how a DIT does all of this can vary widely from project to project.

B Kelley

Here, DITs B Kelley and Carmen Del Toro share their top tips for data-minding on set.

B Kelley
B Kelley — a data-based DIT, underwater camera operator, Phantom technician and former child actor who directs their own short films — is used to the pressure. “No matter what side they are coming from on set, they see the DIT as the bottleneck,” says Kelley, who often works in commercial production. “You have all this prep and production going into the DIT, who then sends it all out to post.” You learn quickly, says Kelley, to be flexible and change up your questions depending on the crew member or department. “If you’re talking to the DP, you can say, ‘OK, here are our storage needs and here are our speed needs, so that I can keep up with you and you aren’t slowed down by me.’”

Convincing production to invest in decent hard drives that will keep the bottleneck from happening and live up to expectations, however, is always a challenge. Most production companies don’t spend much time or money thinking about optimal storage workflows. “When I show up on a job and I’m told, ‘Oh, the production company has its own hard drives,’ this usually gets an eye roll. What that often means is they have awful hard drives that they spent next to nothing on.”

B Kelley’s DIT setup

But Kelley has also been pleasantly surprised, like the time they arrived on set to find a fleet of OWC ThunderBlade RAIDs ready to put into action. “They were very, very fast. It just makes sense to have a lot of very fast, reliable hard drives that you can send out with the crew on productions. I always recommend these drives to the commercial production companies I work with. They will pay for themselves after three jobs.”

Kelley says OWC drives, like those 16TB ThunderBlades, are a rare solid option in what once was a more crowded market. “We used to have a lot more to choose from, but it seems that in general, the industry has eliminated the middle-ground HDD spinning disc hard drives. G-RAID, which used to be the standard, was bought by Western Digital, who changed their usability.”

For smaller storage needs that still need speed, Kelley’s go-to is the SanDisk Extreme Pro portable bus-powered SSD. “They are a reliable and affordable option for shuttle and transcoding drives,” Kelley says.

B Kelley

In addition to Red cameras and the Sony Venice, “all flavors” of the ARRI Alexa reign supreme on Kelley’s commercial shoots, especially the Mini and the large-format Mini LF. Kelley prefers the intraframe compression of ProRes to prepare files quickly and painlessly for the edit. “On set, the Mac is king, and as a DIT, I always try to push people toward ProRes,” Kelley says. “There are some cases, however, when you really need that extra latitude, and Raw is more relevant. But most of the time, shooting Raw doesn’t really make sense from a time and money standpoint, given what you’re actually shooting.” On Sony Venice shoots, Kelley says X-OCN, Sony’s version of Raw, is the default codec.

Although Kelley says some of the best DITs working today are those doing on-set color grading on feature films, a data-centric approach is well-suited to commercial and live-event production shoots. “At the higher level, DITs are most sought-after for their color abilities,” Kelley says. “I take more of a storage workflow design approach, so I am very much geared toward the total workflow. I would much rather deal with a seven-camera shoot than live-grade a three-camera shoot.”

B Kelley’s cart

For the Billboard Women in Music Awards, Kelley managed input from 27 cameras at once. “That was an insane, wild night. There were performances, and there were awards given. I ended up going back to the Billboard offices and co-opting 10 of their computers.”

For three years running Kelley has also worked on the Billboard Hot 100 Music Festival at Jones Beach in New York. “We used somewhere between 250 cards in a three-day span,” Kelley says. “In the last year I did the festival, I had four computers running off of a server to try and keep up. That was an intense experience and such a great workflow. I had six editors sitting in the trailer with me taking what I was downloading live and cutting it together. It was a challenge but also a complete thrill. I loved it.”

Kelley says that when downloading footage, every DIT should run a common software calculation called a checksum that compares material on your original media to the copies for other departments. “Obviously, you scrub through the footage and make sure everything’s good, but you always should be using some sort of software that uses this checksum so that not only are you protected, but you can point to the checksum in the report and say, bit-by-bit and software-verified, that everything was there,” Kelley says.

“It’s worth taking the extra amount of time to get the checksum rather than trying to deliver a faster file. This is why I find it crazy when they push off the storage and downloads onto a less experienced person,” who might mistakenly think speed is the only objective when prepping and delivering files.

Although the pandemic pushed clients to embrace more remote streaming in all aspects of production, Kelley says clients’ actual storage workflows haven’t changed much in the past two years. “What has changed, because of more remote streaming, is the number of people on set,” the DIT says. “Before, too many people on set would really slow us down. But having them on a stream connected to one person, who’s the voice of the client, is a much more seamless workflow. I really do hope this has changed for good.”

Other projects that Kelley has worked on include L’Oreal/Younger, Patrón Tequila and Red Carpet Makeup.

Carmen Del Toro

Carmen Del Toro
For Carmen Del Toro, aka “Data Lady,” creating optimal conditions for every piece of data-minding hardware on set should be the primary goal. “It is so important that the negative is in a stable environment,” she says. “I like to use anything that’s nonvolatile, like NVMe SSD memory storage and solid state drives, when the production has the budget. The more time you spend downloading data, the more all the components heat up, and there is a larger risk of failure. But if you have fast storage, transfers happen quicker, and the devices — computer, media, drives, readers, hubs, etc. — are not in extreme-heat situations for a prolonged time.”

Her friend Dane Brehm, a DIT at Cintegral, first introduced her to NVMe storage. “Dane is a mad, happy genius about everything storage and has this great motto: ‘Fast drives save lives.’ I think this is so true,” she says. “Just yesterday, I sent a list to the Apple TV+ show I’m starting next week in LA, a sci-fi/fantasy shot on greenscreen for preteens. They asked me, ‘How much time do you need after wrap?’” That’s when she knows she needs to push for buying faster cards and drives up front. “If it’s up to them, they would buy [cards with] 165Mb transfer speeds with a regular USB 3.0. So when we show up, we work for 12 or 14 hours, and then a DIT like me or the loader gets to stay to offload that last card that they’re shooting.” Slow, unreliable cards and drives make everything drag on. “On set they’re saying things like, “OK, one more, just keep rolling. Let’s let it go. Let’s reset. Reset. Reset.” What could have been a 250-gig offload becomes a 700-gig offload.”

Starz’s Shining Vale

At that point, adds Del Toro, it’s not just the DIT or the loader left standing around. “It’s the teamster. It’s the set medic, the PAs, the second AD. Everybody who’s waiting for that data sheet at the end of the night. By the time you get home, you’ve been out for 17 hours. I have the varicose veins to prove it! I push for productions to get out of that space because they think they’re saving money, but they could easily put that overtime money into faster hard drives. If they say, ‘I thought you guys liked overtime,’ I always say, ‘Well, I like life better!’”

When she can’t “do what I need to do in a half hour or less” after wrap, Del Toro gets creative. “I try to do crazy things, like individual camera offloads. It costs a little bit more money because I get two readers, and I am supposed to be reading two different cards to the same drive. I have an A camera drive and a B camera drive, and I send to two drives on my breaks.”

Carmen Del Toro on set of I Know What You Did Last Summer

Should the production company ask her for advice on which drives to buy, “I try to push OWC because I think their products are reliable,” she says. “They have a good warranty. If they fail, OWC is pretty good at replacing them quickly. If they say they are too expensive and ask for another option, I suggest Glyph drives, which are more affordable. This is the thing about hard drives. No two are alike, and there could be a snafu somewhere. A cable could be soldered wrong, for example, or it suddenly stops connecting.”

Del Toro has been using Glyph tools , which transfer at about 900Mb/s, on a number of recent episodic shows shot with the Sony Venice. “The camera’s readers only go up to like 600MB/s or something,” she says. “The drive will still be faster, or it will pair up. There’s no lag or loss.” Del Toro’s cart workstation is based on a modified Apple Mac Pro “trash can” Xeon CPU. She recently added a 55-inch OLED monitor that she hopes her grip colleagues can help securely mount to her cart.

After running cables through extreme conditions on location for Netflix’s Narcos for three years, Del Toro says she now prefers to work on a sound stage. “I loved working amid the chaos of shows like that,” she says, “but now I find working in the studio so much better. I’ve run 200-foot lines through the Atacama Desert, buried them in the sand, then had a timer on to go and unbury them with ice because I didn’t want the cords to melt. I’ve worked in caves where, when I opened my rack, everything was calcified. Also in countries where there’s no RF control, and the video image suddenly disappears. I had to be the person saying, ‘We’ve got to do it like we did in 1985. Only the guy looking through the camera can see. So don’t fuck it up!’

I Know What You Did Last Summer

Del Toro, like Kelley, has several parallel talents beyond her current role as a union IATSE Local 600 DIT. An art history major turned assistant editor, she spent her early career in post before transitioning to production in 2010. “When the HD camera came out, somebody in the post house where I worked needed to figure out how to convert HD to SD and use AJA Kona cards,” she says. “I read a lot of manuals, and then I got introduced to the Avid Symphony Nitris. There was a company that did what they call dead-end color correction for reality TV shows. They would color on the Nitris and then print out to tape.”

She was hooked, and now she does live color grading on nearly every project. She’s also a self-taught and FAA-certified drone pilot. “That’s a dream of mine, to just do color work — and fly my drone all the time,” she says.

Recent projects for Del Toro include I Know What You Did Last Summer, Them and Shining Vale.

Beth Marchant, a former staff and contributing editor of StudioDaily.com, writes about entertainment technology and craft for The Los Angeles Times and IndieWire. Follow her on Twitter@bethmarchant.