Big Primate Pictures, the production company behind “King Kong,” and Weta Digital, the movie's digital effects house, used an end-to-end Avid post-production workflow to bring to life Peter Jackson's vision of the 1933 movie classic. The all-digital production environment, which included 11 Media Composer Adrenaline systems, three Avid Unity shared-storage solutions, an Avid Xpress Pro system, a Digidesign Pro Tools HD system, and the use of Avid DNxHD for HD screenings, facilitated a collaborative workflow for the film's post-production teams.
While overseeing post-production on the film, Jamie Selkirk, the Academy Award winning editor for “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” and supervising editor for Big Primate Pictures, worked with director Peter Jackson and editor Jabez Olssen. Big Primate’s post team used nine Media Composer Adrenaline systems to make editorial cuts, review sequences and view dailies. A second team at Weta Digital completed visual effects on two additional Media Composer Adrenaline systems connected to an Avid Unity LANShare system.
Both teams were linked via two Avid Unity MediaNetwork shared-storage systems, allowing them to continuously exchange sequences as they were updated with new cuts and effects. By the time the film was completed, the post-production teams had stored, managed and shared media assets for about 96,000 visual effects and live action shots without ever deleting any files they had created during the process. The film's sound team used Digidesign's Pro Tools to assemble dialogue, sound effects, and music sequences, importing more than 400 hours of audio files.
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