Storage, Transcoding & Dailies
Storage
Today’s digital cinema cameras generate a tremendous amount of data which makes it even more critical that the offloads are handled properly. With most camera cards being 512GB or 1TB of data, this requires a large amount of fast storage. The DIT oversees this process with the selection of appropriate hard drives or SSD storage, and either handles this task themselves or with the assistance of a loader. Redundancy is critical and when large amounts of data are generated, sometimes two or more download systems are required. A key part of this process is quality control (QC) where the footage is checked for errors so problems can be caught in time before leaving set.
Transcoding & Dailies
Most big shows will have a post house that handles the ingest and transcoding of footage for editorial. This is traditionally known as dailies. However on smaller shows and commercials, a DIT will often be responsible for making transcodes on set. This usually done using DaVinci Resolve and a relatively powerful computer. The bigger the data is (e.g . 8k RAW), the more computing power is required to process the footage quickly and efficiently.