Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545821
a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 6 c g w 1 5 up all of these pipelines and doing test shots through the vendors to say, "Hey, we know that your proprietary pipeline is not ready for this, so let's get ready together." And across 12 vendors, when you have 12 different proprietary workflows through those vendors, working through each one of those nuances with each team and making sure that we understand. So we can also remember as we're reviewing those shots, "These are the limitations," or "Here's the successes," and utilizing these dif- ferent pipelines and these different vendors. It was a lot. We looked at many pixels many times, but we had a lot of great support and a lot of great teamwork, which I feel is also kind of a rarity. Hnedel and I have come from a vendor side, so if any- one appreciates a really great setup of a show, it's us, because we've been there. We've been given the worst of the worst, but also the best of the best. Stepping back from the client side and making sure that we're in- tegrating the needs of what we wish we would have had in a normal show and implementing those, and making sure we have an open space for people to say, "Hey, wouldn't this be cool?" or "Would this be helpful?" It wasn't just like, "This is how you're going to do it — too bad." It absolutely evolved and changed. In the beginning of the season, it's very supportive of DMP matte paintings and we're just world building. Then by Episode 4, there's a guy that's glowing, and we're like, "How do we get the glow to translate through both versions?" In the color version it looks beautiful and vibrant, but in the black-and- white version, some of those effects get muted. Working with the colorist and his team to say, "Okay, how many different mattes do we need? We need a subdermal glow, we need a vein glow, but we also need the background. We also have to make sure that Noir does his jazz hands when he needs to." Just talking through those processes. So in all, it wasn't just like, "Okay, cool. Thank God you delivered the shot." It was, "Okay, thank God you de- livered this shot, but we also successfully delivered it in a creative way that we can look at and give feedback on as efficiently as we possibly could." Each of our teams did have to deliver three editorial QuickTimes per version so we could review those, because we wanted to make sure that we knew what things looked like in the raw state, in log. So that if there were any gotchas, we knew exactly where it came from instead of like, "Oh, that's weird that in this version, you can see this, but you can't see that." So we would review it in the log state and then we would look at the color version and be like, "Oh, look what great colors!" and then look at the black-and-white version, and say, "Okay, well, maybe this isn't working." They're not translating in the same way. Because we did at the end of the day deliver one EXR to the color- ist. We weren't the ones that were delivering two timelines—other- wise we'd still be there. We delivered one single EXR with embedded mattes, and then we would get in with the colorist, and say, "Okay, well, this is what we saw in our process. Obviously, you're going to tweak it how you're going to tweak it. Do we need to go back? Do we need to supply more? Do you like this? Do you not like this?" and just working together through the whole entire process. That really was from day one until day end — two years later.