Codex Transfer Station, flexible recording in the field

Codex Digital presents a new line of transfer and back-up products that will allow users to carry out everything from a simple back-up copy to the complete shipment of an entire production from the filming location to the post-production company in a single, simple transport unit.

Codex Digital, the English company specialized in high-resolution recording systems capable of capturing even above 4K without compression, has presented at NAB'09 a new line of products aimed at making backup copies or sending material from the filming location to the post-production company. This new portable station contains one or two LTO4 backup drives, copying material between them, performing dumping to archive tapes or quickly converting material to a host of post-production formats such as DPX, MXF, DNxHD, QuickTime, AVI, JPEG, BMP and BWF (WAV) with upscaling, colorspace conversion and LTUs.

As with the rest of Codex products, Transfer Station sends results much faster than real time, providing immediate access to the post-production workflow, including files in native mode, regardless of the editing solution intended to be used.

Paul Bamborough, co-founder of Codex, commented that "traditionally, production and post-production have been separate, demanding a unifying flow. We now open that door, carrying out production and post-production seamlessly." Bamborough explains that with the new portable station, those bottlenecks that arise from processing, copying, recopying, ingesting,... processes that consume resources and time are avoided. All of this means eliminating delays and intermediate steps.

Codex systems have been used in numerous productions. For television, they have been used, for example, in the BBC children's series Grandpha In My Pocket, in spots for the Apple iPhone, or in the North American HBO comedy Dane Cook. Warner Bros, Lucasfilms and Disney are other studios that are using Codex technology for film. In stereoscopic productions, the flexibility of Codex systems makes it possible to work very easily in multi-camera, as has been demonstrated in productions such as Journey to the Center of the Earth or Avatar.