Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505509
antiago Salviche is a partner and executive producer at Havoc Content (www.havoccontent.tv), a studio owned by managing director Leslie Harro that includes a diverse team of directors, producers, editors and writers. Havoc Content is both a commercial agency and a production company that produc- es commercials, music videos, narrative content and documentaries. Salviche's credits include work on luxury spots for Cadillac (JLo/Stevie), Tito's Vodka (Smooth) and Puma. He also created a music video-length spot for Tiffany's, titled El Anillo, featuring Jennifer Lopez, who performs in jew- el-adorned costumes. Over the years, Salviche has worked with all of the popular editing systems, including Final Cut Pro 7, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro, but for the past several, he's been enamored with Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve. "It was Avid and FCP 7 for a while, and then it was Premiere for the longest," he recalls of his editing history. "And then 2017 is when I said 'bye bye' to Premiere." The move came following the pur- chase of a Blackmagic camera. "I bought an Ursa Mini awhile back," he notes. "I think it was 2015 or 2016…and it came with a dongle. And I basically moved to the Studio version of [Resolve] eventually because of that purchase." Salviche met Blackmagic Design product specialist Shawn Carlson a few years back and has kept in contact as the application has evolved with improved editing, effects and audio capabilities. Every time a Resolve update comes out, he jumps on the beta version. "I know it's quite risky, (but) for commercials and music videos, because they're so short-form, I'm okay with it crashing from time to time — if it does happen," explains Salviche. "When I start using the new tools, if something hap- pens, I report it. I'll call Shawn and let him know, 'Hey, man, this happened,' so I can help them with the [development] of it. "I met Shawn many years ago, when I started using DaVinci," he recalls. "I fell in love with the system. I didn't know if it was something that I wanted to stay on, but with all this stuff that they've been doing over the past three or four years, I completely migrated and never came back." Salviche has already taken advantage of a number of features in the latest release — DaVinci Resolve 18.5 (now out of beta) — including auto speech to text. The feature is proving to be an enormous help on a current project for R&B singer Tyrese Gibson, who plans to release a documentary that covers the time he spent making his new album. Earlier this year, Gibson released a track in collabo- ration with Lenny Kravitz. "I'm using 18.5 from scratch for it," he says of the documentary's post workflow. Salviche received approximately 8TBs of footage spanning the two years the al- bum was being recorded, and is working to edit four one-hour episodes. "As soon as 18.5 (beta) came out, with the transcribing tool, I received the drives," he recalls. "I was preparing for a grueling six months of transcribing everything with my team." The new feature allows him to tran- scribe the footage's dialogue at speeds much faster than realtime. "It's ridiculous," he says of the perfor- mance. "Right now I'm running the latest spec M1 — a laptop spec that you can buy on the (Apple) site. A 40-minute clips takes about two-three minutes to process. As a matter of fact, and even older spec (Macs), if it doesn't take three minutes, it will probably take five." The ability to process footage and view scripts has been a huge time saver for the Havoc team. "We've got the text there in front of us…You can read faster than it plays, so you can read it fairly fast and really make your selects. Not only text-based, but you highlight the text and the shot comes down into the timeline." Salviche says that what he estimated would be a six-month task of logging and transcribing was reduced to just two weeks. "Not only did we do it in two weeks, but we were selecting the shots and putting them in timeline, so by the time we were done with the 'transcribing,' we actually had a rough cut." Resolve FX relight is another improve- ment in release 18.5 that's captured his attention. "You can basically relight the subject," he says of the feature, which he's finding very useful in his music video work. "I work a lot with Jennifer Lopez, and many other female artists that require a pretty good breezy light on their faces when we're doing beauty stuff and beauty commercials. The relighting feature is a gem! I just shot something with Jennifer and I just tried it for the sake of seeing if I can get a better skin piece…It works like a like a charm!" Havoc Content is home to three Resolve suites, with another at Salviche's home studio and a fifth at the home of AE/finishing artist Kolepa Phy. HAVOC CONTENT STREAMLINES WITH RESOLVE STUDIO 18.5 BY MARC LOFTUS EMPOWERING WORKFLOWS FOR HIGH-END BRANDS & MUSIC VIDEOS S WORKFLOW www.postmagazine.com 14 POST JULY/AUG 2023 Resolve 18.5 is now out of beta.