District 9

In 2008 the HDHUB provided the ground breaking post workflow for the sci-fi feature film "District 9", directed by Neill Blomkamp & produced by Peter Jackson and his company Wingnut films. The film was serviced locally by Kalahari pictures.

Made under a veil of secrecy the production was shot on the RED camera with additional footage on HDCAM SR and XDCAM, over 2 shooting periods for 10 weeks.

The HDHUB provided a complete digital production pipeline from set to post with location data wrangling on set through to fibre optic San network with editorial, data workflow and backup.

"We have never done anything quite on this scale or technical complexity as this project before" said HDHUB Technical director Jacques McDonald. "For editorial alone we had three assistant editors , four HD Avids with a central fiber optic network and 20TB SAN. Data wrangling systems on set, not to mention 2K quality check systems and VFX support. In total we had over 11 systems on the show. By the end of the project we had produced over 120TB of data with data traveling to visual effects companies in New Zealand and Canada."

"At the time I remember people outside the project talking about how hard it was to deal with an hour of RED. We often dealt with 5 hours of footage a night every night for the duration of the shoot. Our data backup systems had to handle this large amount of data with fail safe redundancy and integrate directly with Park Road post in New Zealand, the renowned post company owned by Peter Jackson."

It was one of the best experiences we have had working on any feature project, the production crew were fantastic, this film both technically and creatively is unique and we are proud to have been a part of it... The HDHUB Team..

District 9 will be released internationally by Sony Pictures / Columbia-Tristar on the 14 August 2009