Cinelab London Streamlines Media Management and Storage to Deliver Rapid Turnaround


In 2020, 52% of the


motion picture nominations for the Oscars were shot


on celluloid film. Shooting with this medium has


enjoyed a huge uptake in recent years.


Whilst there may be


numerous practical reasons to shoot using digital


instead of film, the unique capture of celluloid is


why it’s still considered as the ‘go-to’ for many


filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg.


Many new Directors and Cinematographers are discovering a passion for


film, due to the way film captures light exposure, colour and shading in comparison to digital.


During the production process for films and shows shot with film, the daily ‘rushes’, exposed rolls of film footage from the day’s shoot, need to be sent to a film laboratory for processing, scanning and digitising overnight for next day viewing and editing. That’s where Cinelab London comes in….


As the world’s leading film


laboratory, major motion pictures like ‘No Time to Die’ and ‘Wonder Woman 1984’, award winning episodic (Succession Seasons 1 and 2), commercials (John Lewis, Nike, Burberry) and music videos (Beyonce, Coldplay, Dua Lipa), have depended on Cinelab London to process and scan many, many thousands of rolls of film into digital files for easy distribution to editors and post-production teams to work, with a quick turnaround. In digitising film footage, Cinelab London is able to carefully retain the film’s inherent qualities in the scanned version and, in doing so, they generate between 20-30 terabytes of new digital content on an average day.


Generating Large Amounts of Data In converting film to digital data, Cinelab London uses the Arri HDR, Scanity HDR and Spirit 4K film scanners that write data at 1GB+ a second and transcodes this data to the formats required by the end user. For


how different filing systems work and really understand


media files.” Adrian Bull


CEO, Cinelab London


example, they create lower resolution files for editing, or can create high resolution uncompressed 2K and 4K files of scenes where a client may wish to review in detail. The rate of scanning and writing data scales to huge levels when delivering for a big studio production that can have up to 200-300 people on set shooting material over the course of a day.


team is very good at understanding


“The pixitmedia This managed service of scanning


and writing data relies on the pixstor solution to efficiently and securely manage Cinelab London’s millions of assets and complex workflows between internal and external production teams. Serving the rapid and diverse requirements of a film production and transcoding high resolution assets to editorial files, pixstor delivers a high performance, high bandwidth storage solution with an agile and reliable infrastructure.


Ambition to Deliver Data at Scale Turnaround of rushes is absolutely critical for Cinelab London and production crews. Production crews need to review footage quickly to decide whether it is necessary to reshoot scenes that may require particular locations, sets or acting talent. With an ambition to streamline


current workflows and pivot the company’s data strategy, Cinelab London needed a unified data infrastructure and fresh approach to its data strategy which could enable the business to confidently scale. Having built the company around a proprietary technology that creates the


Scanity HDR Scanning 35mm - Photo Courtesy of dft (Digital Film Technology)


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