Crossed interview with Esteban Perrin and Thomas Briant Macgregor

User casesWednesday, 12 October 2022

Thomas and Esteban, both members of ADIT, have been working as DIT for several years. Users of Dailycious on several projects of different types, we proposed them to take part in an interview to discover how the application has fit their workflow on high-end French and international productions.

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To start, could you please tell us a bit about yourself ?

Esteban : Hi there, I’m Esteban, a young DIT from Paris. I’ve only been a DIT for a year and a half now but my passion for color and photography has been brewing for many more years. Thanks to Thomas, a couple other DITs and the fine folks at Be4Post my DIT career has been progressing quickly from small data management commercials to live grading bigger series on set. I started off as an On Set Previsualization operator, continued on towards on set VFX work as a QTake Operator assisting VFX supervisors and finally had the chance to start working on color as a DIT. Not quite sure what’s up next for me, but I really enjoy where I am at the moment and hope to have the chance to pursue look development and DIT work with passionate cinematographers that will keep things challenging for me.

Thomas : Hello, I’m Thomas. I have been working as a DIT and data manager on feature films and commercials for more than 8 years now. I mainly work as a DIT near set on long form fictions and add the livegrading part on commercial jobs. I also worked a lot as a phantom technician for the past 10 years.

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What kind of projects are you usually working on?

Esteban : I finished my second serie a couple months ago as a Near Set DIT and am now in the midst of a big Netflix project as an On Set DIT. When I’m not on longer projects I usually fill my weeks with commercials mixing Near Set, On Set and QTake VFX work. 

Thomas : I usually work mainly on commercial jobs and work on long form fictions about once a year. I finished a big disaster film in may and I am now back on commercial jobs.

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Could you describe how Dailycious fits into your workflow ?

Thomas : I was happy to add Dailycious into my workflow as I always found that we were missing an easy and intuitive way to deliver dailies to local and remote users. It fits very easily into my workflow, I render H265 from my synced dailies and export an XML from Silverstack for all the metadata, drag and drop into the dailycious folder and… Done.

Esteban : Dailycious has fit in my workflow to push Dailies to my production crew. I render proxies out on set and push them to the cloud. It’s as simple as it sounds!

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Who do you usually give access to the dailies through the app ?

Esteban : I believe the more crew members get to see what they are working on, the more everybody feels involved and as a team. I thus try to make production and post production sign off on an as extensive as possible list. 

Thomas : Just like Esteban I also think that the more people can see what we are creating together, the better. However, in the end, the people that use it the most are usually the Directors, Cinematographers, Producers and script supervisors. Production designers are also really happy to have access to it as it’s the best way for them to see how there great work renders in camera very quickly after it’s been shot.

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// Quick check for Jean-Jacques Annaud and Jean-Marie Dreujou on the set of Notre-Dame on fire. //

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Does Dailycious make it easier for you to communicate about the image with the cinematographers you work with ?

Esteban : So far my cinematographer and I have been working a lot over stills. Time constraints make it tough for him to watch over Dailies. So unfortunately not through Dailycious but through online drives. Nonetheless, it has helped my cinematographer discuss with the director and potentially pass things on to me. It has also helped discuss things with the camera and script departments. 

Thomas : I also work a lot with stills for communicating with the Cinematographer about what we shot during the day but they often come back the next day with comments after watching whole takes on dailycious. They would also often have comments after watching the week’s work over the week end. Dailycious (especially in local version) enables them to be able to watch everything shot whenever and wherever they like allowing to take a step back about the work done.

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Dailycious works both locally and in the cloud. You have used both modes, could you explain what changes from one mode to the other ? And why do you prefer one or the other?

Esteban : Local and cloud are two different but complementary features within Dailycious. Pushing dailies to the cloud allows a more extensive list of crew members to access dailies, but pushing locally to devices makes it possible to pass things on to crew members in record time. Furthermore, while on location, fast upload speeds are often a luxury, so for pressing matters or for important crew members such as the cinematographer, director, producer… the speed and ease of pushing locally is a massive time saver. 

Thomas : Between cloud and local version, nothing changes for the DIT as the manager software is the same for both use. You only add your shots once and they become available in the cloud and locally at the same time. I personally prefer the local version as it allows to be very responsive as you can upload the dailies to the ipads as soon as you’re done transcoding and you know that people will be able to watch the dailies in the best conditions (no loading time) wherever they are.

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According to you, what are the strongest features of Dailycious ?

Esteban : I think some of Dailycious’ strongest features are the dual local/cloud synchronization, the intuitive and simple to navigate interface and the simple but effective search function. I think the invitation and authentication for crew members is simple and effective.

Thomas : To me, Dailycious’ strongest features are the simplicity and ergonomy of use for the DIT as well as for all users. The ability to manage local and cloud libraries from the same software is very convenient. I also like the playlist fonction that allows to put a few shots together very easily either for validating an edit or for showing a selection of shots to some guests on set.

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What would you like to see in the app soon ?

Thomas : Less bugs 😅

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Ahah ! Another comment?

Esteban : From my time using Dailycious, I’ve had wonderful feedback from crew members from all departments. While there have been a few bugs here and there, as well as some somewhat frustrating functionalities , I think the app shows great potential and isn’t missing much to be the feature packed and simple to use dailies app it aspires to be.

Thomas : I’ve been very happy with using dailycious in my projects and I will be more than happy to use it again for the next projects.as passer.

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Esteban Perrin : IMDB / Thomas Briant Macgregor : IMDB / ADIT professional organization

*The main picture has been taken by Brice Barbier, beside the shooting of HawaiI

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