Post Magazine

October 2010

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Digital Acquisition ganizes and delivers dailies to the lab at Bur- bank’s Level 3 Post (www.level3post.com). Armed with a Mac Pro with Red Rocket, Red Cine-X and other software provided by Lightiron Digital, he copies material onto a 32TB SAS RAID and two shuttle drives, the latter dispatched to Level 3 overnight.The facility copies the drives to Facilis TerraBlock storage and uses a Symphony with Red bility.” He notes that consulting colorist Ste- fan Sonnenfeld “set the initial look for the show, which George applies across the rest of the series. Since there’s so much world travel, different looks help the audience identify the locations — Madrid warm and yellow, Russia darker and more contrasty, Paris more color saturated.” A DPX file sequence of the conformed show goes into a DVS Clipster so Manno can work with nonlin- ear sequences on his DaVinci 2K. He outputs a video assembled master on HDSR as an addi- tional tape back-up. Level 3 also cuts in visual ef- FX’s Terriersis shot on the Panavision Genesis. Post is done at Encore. Rocket and Avid V.5 software to transcode them to DNx36 files for the creative editing team at Warner Bros.working on a comple- ment of Avid Media Composers. Udoff also transcodes the material to H.264 and loads it onto Apple iPads so the DP, among others, gets to see MOS dailies — or most of the dailies — by the end of the shoot day.“People can literally watch al- most everything that night,” says associate producer Geoff Garrett. Once the three editors cutting at Warner Bros. and their assistants get the show “it’s no longer a Red show — it’s just what they’re used to seeing,” he explains.“There are no dailies reels in the conventional sense: Every time the camera starts and stops it produces a separate clip which, in essence, is your daily reel, each with a unique name and ID so you can go back and reconform the show.” The editors deliver Avid sequences to Level 3 accompanied by QuickTime refer- ences of what the picture looks like. Level 3’s editors go back to the original 4K R3D files and re-transcode at 1920x1080 full-resolution HD, 10-bit, 444 color space for the conform. “They take off any burnt-in color set- tings and produce a neutral look so colorist George Manno can reference what was done on set and recreate it or take the next step,” says Garrett. “It’s all about flexi- 22 Post • October 2010 fects from DPX files delivered by various vendors. Sound is recorded separately in a film- style workflow and reconfigured from the production sound mixer’s DVD-RAMs. Garrett notes that “not many people are using the Red Rocket- enabled Symphony workflow.We developed it for the show and are able to do everything in one bay — the dailies, the online, pull VFX — because it all goes back to the origi- nal R3D files. Level 3 is looking to expand the capabilities of this workflow so multiple Avids can connect to the same system.” TERRIERS Terriers, the new FX series from Shawn Ryan and Ted Griffin, about buddies who are also unlicensed PIs, follows the Fox studio mandate for digital acquisition — in this case with Panavision’s Genesis camera, the choice of DP Curtis Wehr. Although a DIT was on the set of the pilot, once the series got underway Wehr went solo on location in San Diego and Ocean Beach, CA. “He decided to shoot Genesis as if it were film, and just go with his instinct of what felt right,” says co-pro- ducer Nick Bradley. “Curtis, myself and En- core Hollywood colorist Pankaj Bajpai worked on the look of the show during the pilot and got on track with each other. Everything fell into place nicely for the se- ries without a lot of testing; the show has a great, really unique look.” Terriers takes advantage of DiTV, Encore Hollywood’s (www.encorehollywood. com) file-based workflow.Wehr captures images to HDCAM SR tapes that are delivered to Encore, ingested into their SAN and con- verted to DPX files. Dailies colorist Jason Altman saves full-resolution DPX files, both www.postmagazine.com raw and colored. DVCAM cassettes are made for the editors working on the Fox lot in LA, who digitize the footage into Media Composers and cut the show. Once the show is locked, all the online work is done from DPX files. Bajpai per- forms the final color grading with Autodesk Lustre. Editors John Hirota and Rob Williams use Autodesk Smoke to conform, title and do VFX drop-ins. Alex Espinoza, post super- visor on Terriers, takes advantage of being able to do VFX drop-ins and final color si- multaneously to save time thanks to En- core’s link between Lustre and Smoke. “I’ve done several shows with Encore DiTV,” Bradley reports. “We did a lot of R&D on the process for The Unit, which shot film that was converted to DPX files. What I like about DiTV is that it’s very adaptable. No matter what you shoot on, once footage is converted to DPX files the post production is the same.” He cites the example of another show he’s working on, Ride Along, a Chicago-based police drama that will debut on Fox in Janu- ary.“We switched to Arri Alexa for the series, and not too many shows are on that camera yet. DP Rohn Schmidt has been shooting Alexa to HDCAM SR, and it works great. Now we’re shooting simultaneously to tape and straight to ProRes so we can do side-by- side tests. Encore is investigating the best way to do ProRes post efficiently;we have to see if it can pass the studio’s QC tests for domes- tic and international markets.” According to Bradley,“all DPs who have gotten their hands on Alexa think they’ve found the best of all possible worlds. Our in- house producer at Encore, Jason Parks, and VP of DiTV Services, Jennifer Tellefsen, are working closely with Arri to test ProRes.” Overall, the move from film to digital ac- quisition for shows he’s worked on has been “a smooth transition,” he says.“What I espe- cially like about it is how it’s brought the post production department and camera department closer together.We have more communication than ever before. Everyone is talking to each other a lot more.” WHITE COLLAR USA Network’s stylish White Collar takes a bicoastal approach to production and post. The series shoots in New York City with a Sony F35 as DP Russell Fine’s primary camera; a Sony EX3 is used for inserts and shooting on the fly, and a Sony DSR-PD150 camcorder that records to DVCAM tape is used to capture “surveillance” footage. Oth- mar Bickauer is the on-set DIT.

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