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Hollywood-DI has fun with Kevin Hart film EST HOLLYWOOD — Hollywood-DI (www.hollywooddi.com) per- formed color grading and finishing for Laugh At My Pain, a 90-minute feature scheduled for release this fall.The film stars comedian Kevin Hart and includes his stand-up routine — captured at the Staples Center in LA — along with a documentary on the early years of his life in Philadelphia, an interview with Larry King, and a Reservoir Dogs bank heist spoof. Hollywood-DI completed the job using Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve.The studio just upgraded to the beta version of Resolve 8 and used the film as an opportunity to put the tool through its paces. Hollywood-DI is a long-time Blackmagic user, with numerous Apple Mac Pro-based editing and coloring systems using DeckLink capture and playback cards and HDLink monitoring solutions.The facility also has a Studio Videohub at the core of its HD SDI infrastructure. The Resolve runs on a Mac Pro connected to a PCIe expansion outfitted with three Nvidia GTX285 graphic cards and a Red Rocket card.The solution allows the studio to color 2D features, as well as stereo 3D work. Pinkau grades The Pinkau team used a variety of formats during production. ARNEMÜNDE, GERMANY — Pinkau (www.pinkau.de), one of the first German companies to create 3DS entertainment con- tent as well as offer specialized 3D underwater equipment, recently pro- duced Oceans 3D.The feature's underwater scenes were filmed on loca- tion in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aquaba and in Egyptian National Parks. Pinkau recently added Iridas's SpeedGrade NX to its post capabili- ties allowing it to grade and finish the underwater movie in stereo 3D. "Our workflow for Oceans 3D relied on a variety of cameras and "We go out dual stream HD SDI from our Mac Pro through the DeckLink HD Extreme 3D card into a dual-link HD SDI Panasonic plasma for calibrated color grading of side-by-side images," explains managing director Neil Smith, "From there, the HD SDI signal is sent to a HDLink Pro 3D DisplayPort box and out through HDMI into a LG 3D TV for stereo mixing." The Kevin Hart film presented several challenges, notes colorist Bjorn Myrholt (pictured), including conforming footage shot by various operators on a number of different cameras into a coherent timeline before color correction could begin.The production used Red, Sony EX3 and Canon 7D cameras, normally a painstaking challenge, he says.,"but with Resolve's ability to change how footage is brought in according to the camera used made the process a lot easier." The footage for the bank heist sketch was shot on a Red One and Canon 7D. Director Tim Story wanted to ensure that the segment had a film feel to it and could stand on its own as a self-contained 15-minute short. "Hollywood-DI was able to take the FCP project files and quickly conform the Red and Canon footage in their DaVinci system. Balancing and blending Red .r3d files with Canon H.264 footage is always tricky, but I wanted to be able to shoot both cameras in different set-ups to keep the action flowing," notes DP Ken Glassing. Myrholt was able to match the differing element using several techniques. "I could lift the gamma on the Canon footage without adding too much noise, and thus created a surprisingly clean grade," he explains.The HLS tool was also extremely helpful in allowing me to remove color artifacts that the Canon cameras picked up.This feature has become one of my favorite tools when working on specific details in the footage that cannot be addressed with primary grading or Power Windows." formats, including Canon HF100 and Canon 5D MKII," explains Thomas Pinkau."We originally planned on using our established Premiere and After Effects pipeline for selecting and fixing shots, but SpeedGrade NX quickly became part of the early post stages as well.With SpeedGrade NX's wide range of tools for analyzing and fixing stereo 3D material, we quickly got addicted to bringing the material directly into the SpeedGrade suite.We even used it for creating the rough cut in S3D." Pinkau says the studio took advantage of the file loading mechanism of SpeedGrade NX, which allows for the automatic loading of left and right eye material after a file structure has been created."While we did- n't rely on the auto correction for the geometry, the auto matching for L/R colorimetry saved us a huge amount of time. It made color grading a breeze as we could focus on creating stunning underwater pictures." FilmLight shows control surface, plug-ins & more ONDON — FilmLight (www.filmlight.ltd.uk) is bringing its new Blackboard 2 grading control surface to the IBC show in Amster- dam. Blackboard 2 was shown for the first time at NAB back in April and has since evolved into a shipping product.The control surface is highly flexible thanks to Adaptive Key Technology, which allows each key to be individually programmed. The company is also launching Baselight 4.3 at IBC, which brings a number of new features and performance improvements to its grading software.The release brings a major upgrade to the 3D stereoscopic tool set, and an Automated Object-Based Tracker now makes it easy to apply grades to moving objects.The new version also includes a high productiv- ity multi-head UI with integrated vector scopes. Performance enhance- ments include timeline caching and background rendering capability. And new Baselight plug-ins for FCP and Nuke will help editors and VFX artists with tools that integrate with a main Baselight system. www.postmagazine.com September 2011 • Post 19 W W L Oceans 3D