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CommercialWorkflows orist with more than 20 year of ex- perience under his belt. He is a long- time da Vinci user and worked at VCA/Teletronics, Image Editorial and Creative Group, before joining Nut- meg last July. Scarpulla says he saw a change in the role of the colorist, as well as in workflows over the past few years. More and more, it was be- coming necessary to perform composites and create titles, in ad- dition to handling color correc- tion. He also saw an increase in digitally-shot projects. He became an Assimilate Scratch user, recog- nizing that the newer digital work- Georgopoulos was on set for this Snuggle fabric softner spot that was shot in Caracas, Venezuela. it’s HDCAM or QuickTime sequences.” New Hat has worked with Finish on a number of projects, including spots for Hyundai, and a project for Universal Studios that was shot with the Phantom camera. “The Phantom camera doesn’t have timecode on it, so if we are going to do the dailies, we assign timecode to those files so when they come back they have something to cut to,” Lafuente explains. “Just like the Alexa and Red, we work with Phantom raw files. Let’s say they shot at 500 frames a sec- ond? We can play back at 30 or 23.98 or 24, what- ever they like, and we give them back Quick- Times, or we could go back to out to tape. When they come back, it’s all on our SAN and it’s a very quick conform.” Pre-production talks, Delivering Your Message... Using Video and the Internet Field 1 Post is a high-quality video editing company offering its video and DVD creation services to the corporate and broadcast television community for over two decades. Let us help you increase profits through effective staff training and advertising. Visit our website for a sampling of our work or call today to see what we can do for your business. www.field1post.com 610-789-2882 info@field1post.com says Lafuente, can help avoid workflows issues, particularly in sessions that might be more stressful when clients are sitting in.“It really helps to do that,” he says of the pre-production meetings. “It’s always good to ask questions.There are a lot of surprises, so it’s good to cover all bases. We don’t like to say, ‘We don’t like to work with one format or another.’ We just say, ‘Bring us what you have and we’ll make it work.’” FINISHING Nutmeg Post’s Gary Scarpulla is a senior col- 24 Post • February 2011 flows presented different challenges, and that Scratch addressed them head on. “The beauty of Scratch is: there is not one format that it won’t take in and finish to. It affords me all of the luxuries and capabili- ties — and then some — of some more traditional hardware-based color grading systems,” he explains. Nutmeg is home to numerous Avid Nitris Adrenaline systems.There are more than a half-dozen on Scarpulla’s floor of the facility alone. His Scratch system is based on a 64- bit Windows 7 workstation with an Nvidia graphics card. The system is controlled through a Tangent four-panel array and is connected to a 12TB GlobalStor server, which each room in the facility has access to. A 50-inch Panasonic pro series plasma is used for monitoring. New workflows, says Scarpulla, can sometimes seem confusing to clients.“A lot of times, the client won’t really know the workflow. They are used to a film-based workflow, and are used to dropping the film off at the lab, and having the dailies done to [a] physical format, whether it’s HDCAM tape or Digi Beta.” A recent Liberty Medical spot was posted entirely in-house, and serves as a good example of what Scarpulla defines as his typical workflow.The project was chal- lenging in that it incorporated a consider- able amount of footage that was shot in front of a greenscreen.“They shot 4K R3D files with the Red camera,” he recalls.“We had the whole project in-house, so I was re- sponsible for the dailies.” Initially, he will copy all the R3D files to his server, bringing them in as native 4K Red files. He also has the option to work right from a source drive, in realtime, if he so chooses. “You call it the dailies transfer,” he says of the files he creates for editorial. “I export Avid MXF files with a basic best light color www.postmagazine.com grade on the footage, just to get them started in the edit.” For the Liberty Medical spot, the color corrected dailies were given to a senior ed- itor as 1920x1080, 23.98 Avid MXF files. “He did the cut with the client,” Scarpulla recalls.“There was some CGI work done and titling.” After the edit is complete and picture is locked, the editor will give Scarpulla an EDL, which he imports back into Scratch and links up with the original 4K files.That con- form, he says, takes place in a matter of sec- onds.“That is the thing that is taking people a little time to wrap their minds around,” he notes.“[Clients will] say,‘I’ll just bring you the QuickTime.’You are short changing the pro- ject…and the Red camera!” Scarpulla says he can now “really dig into the 4K footage,” creating an aesthetic while also ensuring continuity between shots. “I like to get the raw Red footage more akin to a flat negative image that I would have worked on from a film-originated pro- ject,” he explains. “Flat blacks, soft whites, which gives me the ability to take the footage wherever I want.” He values Scratch’s “media browser” fea- ture, which allows him to strip out any meta- data that’s attached to the footage, giving him more flexibility. “I‘ll strip all the metadata out and take in the files raw. Let’s say I take some- thing in and it looks a little hot to me with the attached metadata? I have the ability to go back and change the ISO from a 500 to a 100 to give me a little more room to work. “A lot of systems can deal with Red, [but] what I like about Scratch is that I can tailor the R3D files to get it closer to working with a flat negative.There’s no need for a LUT to look at the Red footage. I can go with what they did on the shoot or strip it off and go from scratch, no pun intended.” Scratch’s compositing capabilities were particularly handy on the Liberty Medical project in working with the greenscreen footage. “A lot of the time, when you are doing the color grade on greenscreen footage, you are in the dark on how it is going to be used.” he notes. “[Our editor] put the background plates on the server for me, so when I did the color correction, I did a quick composite for every select take with the background that was going to be behind it to ensure the best possible results.” Additional challenges involved balancing out contrasts and flesh tones, while still re- taining a good, key-able green, and all the while maintaining a rich filmic contrast ratio. continued on page 45