Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/24970
CommercialWorkflows for him, making sure that he does- n’t make a little mistake. I don’t go out there screaming it, I’ll go whis- per in his ear that it’s too hot or we need to take this or that down.” DAILIES Santa Monica’s New Hat (www.newhat.com), which opened in 2008, built a digital color correc- tion pipeline that best accommo- dates today’s popular digital acquisi- tion formats. The facility is home to three vet- New Hat worked on the Alexa dailies for this La-Z-Boy spot featuring Brooke Shields. feedback on set. A typical Red-shot project will involve transferring the footage from the compact flash cards or drives used for acquisition and getting them in order for editorial.“On the last two jobs, I purchased an SSD module, which replaces the CF module on the side of the cameras. I have two 256SSD cards that now function as my media,” he explains. “They also sell a 1.8-inch SSD reader, called the Red Station, that goes into my computer via ESATA. I go ESATA into the Mac Pro and then Mini SAS out to my RAID.Then I go ESATA back out to the client drives. I re- quire for production to buy me two G-Tech G-RAIDs and I put a mirror copy on both.” Georgopoulos manages the files through a simple folder set-up.“I have three general folders: one will be for the R3Ds, which is the negative. One folder is for the ProRes and also the Avid media, which is the MXF and AIFFs.The other folder will be for the audio. Depending on the DP, there may be a folder for reference stills and XML files with some of the color information.” He makes sure he knows the edit house that will be working on a job downstream in post, and will prepare the files for their specific set up. “I have phone conversations with the editors,” he says regarding his preparation. “We go back and forth. In some cases I am doing the conform, so they’ll send me the ALE (Avid Log Ex- change) and I’ll make the DPX files.” And while the Red camera, along with the Alexa and Phantom, tend to be the most widely used, Georgopoulos is also well versed in handling workflows involving the Sony F23 and F35. “My job is almost a QC agent,” he ex- plains,“making sure there is nothing overex- posed or underexposed, and being the eyes of the DP [who] isn’t necessarily focused on all the teeny little details. I am the back-up 22 Post • February 2011 eran colorists: Bob Festa, Beau Leon, and Michael Mintz, and while all three handle a diverse workload, Festa and Leon tend to specialize in commer- cials, with Mintz working on features. The studio recently completed work on two jobs that were shot using Arri’s new Alexa camera — one for Kia and another for La-Z-Boy. Technical director Mike La- fuente details the facility’s set-up, which is based around FilmLight Baselight 4 color correctors. “You can basically open up any job in any room across the facility,” says La- fuente. “The main difference is one of the rooms is a theater with a 2K projector, and the other two correction suites have broad- cast monitors.Two are more geared toward commercials, where one is more geared to- ward theatrical.” The Baselight systems have the Truelight library of Look Up Tables for previsualizing film images on electronic display devices. For Alexa-shot projects, Lafuente says: “We’ve been getting QuickTimes right off the camera.We have the ability to accept a raw Alexa file, but nobody has been doing that yet.The Baselight has all the codes in it to playback the raw Alexa files on the fly, [but] up to this point, everybody that is shooting with the Alexa is outputting ProRes 4:4:4.” In a dailies scenario, Lafuente says New Hat will color correct the footage and give it back to the client with the exact time-of-day timecode originally recorded.“They go off and cut it and come back with a work tape. Let’s say they did the dailies somewhere else? They come back, [and] what they’ll give us is just an EDL list. It can be a CMX3600. It can be an Avid AAF file, or it can be a Final Cut Pro XML file.” The EDL will be brought into the Base- light system, along with an offline Quick- Time. “The Baselight let’s you do a split screen,” Lafuente explains.“You can split up to nine images, but we usually do a split be- tween two. One has your high-rez Red, for example, and on the other side would have www.postmagazine.com the work picture, which is usually a H.264 QuickTime.We lock them together and go through the EDL and make sure everything looks good, hit the ‘Done’ button and every- thing is conformed.We usually can conform a spot in 10 minutes or so.” The Baselight is able to handle raw footage in realtime, so there is no transcod- ing, says Lafuente. For Red jobs, New Hat will take the R3D files off the compact flash cards or from a hard drive and load them onto the facility’s SAN. In the case of Alexa projects, the footage usually comes in on a hard drive or on the SxS cards that the cam- era captures to. “We are not actually making DPXs or anything.We are working off the raw files. We are the farthest upstream as you can get, other than coming directly off the cam- era, which doesn’t exist, but that is pretty much what we are doing there.”The studio’s SAN provides 4K playback, and each Base- light is also outfitted with its own local stor- age, offering similar performance. New Hat worked with editorial house Fin- ish on a recent Kia spot that promotes the automaker’s Optima.The project was shot on Alexa and brought to the studio, where Festa performed color correction and created the dailies. Files came in on SxS cards. Crash and DIT Dino Georgopoulos worked on this Lincoln spot. First assistant cameraman Shawn Cragin checks the camera. “We dropped it on our SAN, Bob col- ored it with a one light, gave it a nice look, and we sent it off, I believe as ProRes for those guys,” Lafuente recalls.“They cut it and came back and gave us a standard CMX3600.We lined up the cuts and made whatever deliveries they needed, whether