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Muller had used DaVinci Resolve when he was at Company 3 and Pandora and Film- Light's Baselight as a founding member of New Hat. Martinelli had prior experience with Film Master at Ringside Creative. "All systems are limited in one way or another but Film Master is so powerful," says Muller. "It has so many tools: fantastic noise reduction, stabilization, clean-up. There's so much you can do within the box." Martinelli says Film Master "has features other systems lack. Our clients can walk away from Incendio confident that everything that could be done has been done. We've even handled finishing: We delivered The First Time out of Film Master, dropping in all the effects and titles, doing stabilization, clean-up and noise reduction on certain scenes." An interesting feature of their facility is the Dolby 42-inch pro reference monitor used An Incendio Nucoda Film Master suite — they use Dolby pro reference monitors for grading. Grading 'Samsara' as grading monitors in each suite. "They're superb," says Muller. "Clients love them." Mar- tinelli notes that, "we colored our features in DCI P3 and the ability to quickly switch between Rec. 709 and P3 is very powerful." The partners already have a variety of CULVER CITY — Director/DP Ron Fricke's 1992 film Baraka offered a wordless portrait of planet Earth and its many cultures and natural wonders. Fricke's new film, Samsara presents a variety of beautiful images set to a deep musical score. Mark Magidson, who produced the film through his company Magidson Films, also co-wrote and co-edited with Fricke. Like Baraka, Samsara was recorded on 70mm film — the first film in more than a decade to do so. It was shot in some 25 countries and was more than four years in the making. Samsara, however, differs from its predecessor in one key respect. Where Baraka was finished photochemically and exhibited in theaters equipped with 70mm projectors, the new film went through a 4K DI process at Colorworks on the Sony Pictures lot and it will be exhibited digitally in theaters equipped with 4K projectors. Colorworks (www.sonypicturesstudios.com) DI colorist John Persichetti performed final grading in a DI theatre equipped with a Sony 4K projection system. Fricke and Magidson took part in all of the grading sessions. The film does not have a specific "look," Persichetti notes, nor was there a need to match scenes. "We treated each frame like a painting and tried to make it look as realistic and as beautiful as possible," he says. Persichetti had to do some image stabilization to correct for problems caused by the weight of the 70mm cameras and their rigs. He also used Baselight's matte features to correct for light and contrast issues that were a product of shooting in unusual, hard-to-control and often unpredictable locations. 22 Post • March 2012 work to their credit at Incendio, including a second indie feature, Blaze You Out; Lexus Beast and Suzuki Sled Super Bowl XLVI spots; and IBM's immersive, 40-screen Think instal- lation at Lincoln Center that required color correcting six streams of media simultane- ously with native 4K and 5K files in the time- line. "Having 48 pictures on the screen at once was a feat — and we could color each image independently with all the power of Film Master," says Muller. The colorists did a spot for a foreign finan- cial institution that shot about two hours of 35mm film and over three hours of Canon EOS 5D Mark II footage. "The clients booked six hours to color five hours of footage, which was a bit ambitious, so we had to cut back most of the footage and only color the 35mm film and a small selection of the 5D," says Martinelli. Nevertheless, "We were able to color close to three hours of selects and lay them off to tape in realtime without ever rendering — just in time for the clients to make their flight immediately after the ses- sion," he reports. So far looks have been set in the room with occasional still photo references from DPs "as a starting point," says Martinelli. "Typically, we explore the options and find our way with clients." "Without a doubt, the process happens in the room," echoes Muller. "Film Master is fast, so it's a good collaborative tool." Even though Incendio launched less than www.postmagazine.com a year ago, the company quickly saw how the market was changing. "We spec'ed out a SAN with five streams of 2K," Martinelli recalls. "Then our first job asked for 5K back — we weren't expecting that! The amount of data we have to move around is only going to get bigger." COMPANY 3 When senior colorist Siggy Ferstl of Santa Monica's Company 3 (www.company3.com) did the DaVinci Resolve color grading for the 2D and stereo 3D versions of Underworld: Awakening, the colorist, who also graded the two previous Underworld installments, helped refresh the look of the popular vampire- themed franchise. "Underworld has always been synonymous with a cool, blue look," Ferstl notes of the film, shot by cinematographer Scott Kevan. "They didn't want to change that, but they wanted to freshen it up a bit. So we went for a little more separation in the colors when it was appropriate to do so. We added more warmth to images and flesh tones but still kept within the Underworld palette." After establishing the color correction for the 2D release, he used LUTs and addi- tional color grading to offset the 3D ver- sion. "You can find a close match now between the 2D and 3D, then you have to go in and tweak what hasn't fallen into place," says Ferstl. "We had to change the color a bit to help with the dullness of the 3D screen — that hamstrings you in 3D; you're dealing with a lot less light. So all of a sudden images that looked amazing in 2D can look a little dull in 3D. You have to try to generate brightness and image highlights while dealing with low light levels."