The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)

Feature Film

Our Role
Main Unit onset DIT and equipment Services

Directed by
John Madden

Cinematography by
Ben Smithard

Shooting format
Sony F65 - Sony RAW
RED Scarlet - 4K R3D

Experience
Principle Photography took place in Rajasthan, India on this 3 month shoot captured with the Sony F65.

Shooting with two Sony F65 as the A and B cameras, led to a new workstation being developed for this shoot. In order to handle the constant stream of data generated from shooting 16bit Sony RAW on the F65 a huge 3U 16bay rack mounted Netstor 60TB RAID was mounted in a shock proof case on a custom workstation.

Two top spec Apple Mac book Pros were used as offload stations, both with a dedicated SR Memory card reader, connected via Thunderbolt and 10GbE to the RAID. The RAID was fast enough to allow duel MD5 backups simultaneously. Once complete a second MD5 clone would be performed to the rushes shuttle drives.

The workstation also included an 24inch OLED Display for live image QC and video switcher to enable camera signal switching between sources.

The rushes were delivered to the near set lab on wrap each day for editorial file creation and LTO archival.