Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/997235
www.postmagazine.com 36 POST JUNE 2018 COLOR GRADING able, a Netflix requirement. As a 2.2:1 cen- ter extraction, the editors were able to reposition the image subtly, as needed. The image was stabilized further as nec- essary by using sophisticated tracking for repositioning and resizing without loss of resolution upon deliverable at 4K. "David is famous for having a visual style where he is going to stabilize two- thirds of the shots in an episode, or in a movie, so that everything is absolutely perfect," says Weidt. "What he wants is that the camera, the gaze into the image, is totally unconscious, and you're really in there without distractions that most people take for granted." After Fincher returned to Los Angeles, their standard workflow on a scene togeth- er would start with a master shot that incorporated the characters as well as background, timing color and light levels for other shots and angles in scenes to be timed from that reference. Fincher's eye for detail goes far beyond that, though, and Weidt noted several corrected items that would have escaped his attention, like plants outside a prison that were too vibrantly green, or highlights in reflections that needed to be turned down to match light sourc- es. "There are certain colors that David needs to suppress, and that's mostly pink," he continues. "Pink appears in people's skin tones, and if you get it wrong in the grading suite and ends up on a monitor outside of that environ- ment, it's going to appear like they have pink faces and it looks really bad. David wants to control that." Using Summilux-C primes from CW Sonderoptic, XML information was creat- ed for every focal length. This was a re- quirement on Mindhunter as simulations of grain, lens barreling and chromatic aberration in Baselight were tailored to the specific focal length throughout the show. Weidt even created anamorphic effects for the spherical lenses. "David wanted to refer to 70's in what could be called 'the anamorphic wide- screen era,'" he says. "Unfortunately, that focal length is not something that's carried through in metadata. It's tallied by the camera assistant with name of the clip and the focal length and put into a database. I had to find a way to apply the right settings for every single clip, in the absence of metadata." Weidt was able to merge this informa- tion by teaching himself the Python script- ing engine for asset management adding the focal length as a variable in the com- ment field. That enabled him to classify and organize shots by telephoto, standard and wide, then multi-paste effects into an alpha-numerically sorted timeline which came in handy throughout the produc- tion. "It worked beautifully," he says. He also added pseudo chromatic aberration "on every shot and every episode of Mindhunter," which he de- veloped himself, as the vast majority of plug-ins and filters will simply shift one of the primary color plates, stretching from center, resulting in bi-color aberra- tions. These created results that Fincher found lackluster, when for example given a cyan-red, he'd really only want the cyan. "I found the solution in Baselight, which essentially took 20 layers, using blending modes that are usually the pur- view of a compositing tool," Weidt says. "David directed four episodes of Mindhunter, but he's the executive pro- ducer for the show, and he's definitely the director of the DI," he adds. "All of the color, he directed himself, with contribu- tions from Erik." Weidt notes that next season will be shot using a Helium sensor, and HDR monitors will be on set along with a new ACES color space workflow. "We've got 20 layers just for chromatic aberration. We've got lens warping. We've got three different types of grain as well, because you couldn't just have one," Weidt adds, regarding the final rendering process. "Season 2 is going to be just like a real walk in the park compared to season one. We learned so much." Season 2 of Mindhunter is currently in production. Note: Eric Weidt presented the workflow for Mindhunter during an event at Dolby's Old Vine Theater in Hollywood. The event was presented by Baselight, Dolby and Red Digital Cinema. Creating a specific '70s look Mindhunter is graded on Baselight.