Over the last year, the focus of Research by Surreal Road… (and Surreal Road as a company) has shifted slightly. Originally the website (formerly at www.digitalintermediates.org) was aimed at supporting the digital intermediate industry exclusively, as well as to provide supplementary information to my book on the digital intermediate process… but something very interesting has happened during this period.

Roughly this time last year, I wandered into a PC World store. On one of the shelves were several external disk drives with a capacity of one terabyte. That’s strange, I thought, what are consumers doing with that much storage? After all, in the digital intermediate world, a terabyte of storage has rapidly become miniscule. But there are reasons for this: we’re working with high-quality, uncompressed images, and lots of them at that. So what do “regular” people need a terabyte of storage space for, I wondered. At that time, it wasn’t particularly cheap, so I figured it must be for people like photographers who use it for archiving, and so on. But during the last month, that trend has continued. Now you can pick up 2TB of external storage and even afford to just stick it on a shelf somewhere. Sure, it’s not as compact as LTO3 tape backups… but it’s much more convenient for the short-term. So much so that I have recently bought a couple of terabyte drives just to have at home so I don’t have to bother archiving stuff.

I think at some point I predicted that as soon as storage was cheap enough, 4k mastering would become common-place. That hasn’t really happened though, and I think it’s because it’s largely held back by software and other hardware issues (notably display devices). So instead I’ve been keeping an eye on the other end of the market: if there’s no real progress being made at the high-end, you can bet that the lower-end is going to start catching up. I was pondering this at this year’s NAB trade show when Apple announced its new Final Cut Studio line-up. It was pretty much a complete digital intermediate solution, I thought, and the price makes it within the reach of amateur film-makers as well as professionals. With little in the way of innovation from the likes of Autodesk in a long while, I started hedging my bets that the future of the digital intermediate… process was not going to be in the high-tech arena, but rather on the humble desktop computer. And the really interesting thing about the software side, is that with things like Final Cut Studio, there are many, many more people using it on a daily basis, which in turn means that there are more resources to draw on, and that (in theory at least) they tend to have fewer bugs or annoying idiosyncrasies.

What this means for Research by Surreal Road is that it is going to cater less to a niche, high-end market, and instead to a more general, digital post-production audience. Many of the techniques and workflows covered in the book are now equally appropriate to people using Final Cut Pro for example. This doesn’t mean that the current readership will find nothing of value; many of the forthcoming articles will be based directly on my experiences working on the BBC’s Earth movie…, by far the most complex project I’ve encountered to date.

To this end, in addition to the cosmetic changes to the website, there are new discussion forums… (note if you’ve registered on our old forums you will probably need to register again), and some new categories (Opinion…, Tips & Tricks…,
Tools…).

We’ll also be adding tags to new posts, which you can see at the bottom of each page. It’s just another way to find posts of interest. If you’re already subscribing via our RSS feed…, you don’t need to change anything to keep receiving new posts. And last but not least, I’m going to make a concerted effort to write more on here. I’m not sure how much more, but I’ll at least aim to get more than one post a month…