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Digitally Acquired TV Series HBO's Bored to Death: PostWorks in NYC provides on-set editorial systems, as well as dailies, color grading and finishing services. light and Quantel systems work off of a DVS StoreNext SAN on Data Direct hardware. For delivery, PostWorks creates a 23.98 SR master. LTO-4 back-ups are made of all the camera data. Session files are backed up as well. All media is turned over to HBO at season's end. "We had discussed with HBO doing file- based deliverables, but right now, I think their QC pipeline is set up for tape. It would be more difficult for them to work from data," Beirne notes. "We are 100 percent file based until we air our broadcast master," says Coello-Ban- non. The show is delivered on HDCAM SR tape, and its assets, including all dailies, files and the final color-timed master are archived to LTO tape. BORED TO DEATH The HBO comedy series Bored to Death is entering its third season, and PostWorks (www.pwny.com) in New York City is again providing on-set editorial systems as well as dailies, color and finishing services. The show was created by author Jonathan Ames, and stars Jason Schwartzman as a Brooklyn-based writer who moonlights as an unlicensed private detective. Ted Danson and Zach Galifianakis also star. Each of the first two seasons consisted of eight episodes, and while that may seem like a more relaxed schedule than other series, PostWorks' executive VP for technology, Joe Beirne, says Season 3 is stepping it up with an increase in the number of visual effects fea- tured in the episodes. Bored to Death is shot on Arri Alexa cam- eras by DP Vanja Cernjul. Sean Donnelly serves as the series' DIT. The Arri Alexas record in the ProRes 4444 format, which Beirne describes as an RGB plus alpha channel format. "You can record a key channel as well," he notes. "They shoot in Log C, which is the Arri digital nega- tive format, and they have a couple of LUTs 22 Post • October 2011 that they use to pull the data into a way they want it to read." PostWorks converts the footage in its Colorfront On-Set Dailies (OSD) systems. The studio's dailies colorist, Andrea Acs, will also load all of DIT Sean Donnelly's LUTs and check the material against style frames. Sync is also checked. "Then we produce deliverables out of the OSD, one of which is a DNx36 cutting room copy that is used by the Avid editors on the show." PostWorks provides several Avid NLEs and Unity storage to Bored To Death for edit- ing on the soundstage where they shoot. "We also keep a copy of all the DNx36 media and we link it to the project that comes back from the Avids on the stage," Beirne adds. "That linked project is the pic- ture guide that we use to conform. We conform the show in DS Nitris and we flip the uncompressed MFX media to the Film- Light Baselight." Using several LUTs and a color decision list provided by the DIT, the show's color is finished in a Baselight by John Crowley. PostWorks also handles some of the series' visual effects, as does Click 3X in New York City. "The editor that works on that show is George Bunce," Beirne notes, "and he does most of the stuff in an iQ Pablo. He's a senior conforming editor and VFX editor." PostWorks has an Avid Unity in-house, which it uses to QC the DNx36 media before sending it out to editorial. The Base- www.postmagazine.com LEVERAGE Hollywood's Electric Entertainment (www.electricentertainment.com) produces Leverage, the TNT series that brings together an odd-ball crew that solves crimes using individual skills developed as a criminal, tech- nology expert, retrieval specialist and grifter. The show recently completed production on its fourth season. When we interviewed post production engineer Bill Ritter, the series was mid-way through post on the new season, which will begin airing in November. Leverage shoots with Red One and Epic cameras. The production may use as many as six or seven cameras for action sequences. Season 4 will include 18 episodes and Sea- son 5, which will begin shooting in February, has 15 episodes slated for production. Each episode is shot over a seven-day span. According to Ritter, a laptop/ingest station resides on set — Boston in the past and more recently Portland, OR — where foot- age from the Red cameras is offloaded and copied. The footage is then loaded to a 42TB SAN in-house at Electric Post where epi- sodes are cut using Final Cut Pro 7. Three picture editors and three assistants rotate on the episodes undergoing post production. Each episode is cut to 43 minutes in length, and Ritter says the upcoming season introduces a sixth commercial break, pre- senting challenges for both the writers of the show and its editors. The show is cut in the