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www.postmagazine.com 27 POST FEBRUARY 2015 Colorist Josh Petok "spent a signifi - cant amount of time working with the producers before the fi rst episode, estab- lishing the general look of the show," says Palatnick. "There's a dramatic diff erence between what comes out of the camera and what viewers see on their screens." "The image is nothing like what the F800 is shooting," Petok agrees. "In prepro before Season 1, we decided on a dystopian 300 kind of look, so we color the sand in a certain way, make sure the colors of the wardrobe pop out. There's so much going on during the shoot that there's no time to set looks, so it's up to us to dial them back in in post. I couldn't do it without Resolve: I can play back multiple nodes, track windows and sharpen images all in realtime, which gives me great creative freedom." Palatnick explains that, "to keep the Resolve workfl ow moving quickly, we add- ed a Cubix PCI expander and two Nvidia GeForce GTX690 dual-GPU video cards for image processing and rendering." That extra juice gives Petok about 120fps rendering speed for fi nal deliv- ery. "We render out a DNxHD fi le and it exports at that speed," he says. "This en- ables us to get the fi nal delivery fi les out very quickly. It takes about 10 minutes to render out a full show, which contains noise reduction, sharpening, multiple windows and qualifi ers. With deadlines constantly looming, it's great to have that speed when you need it." Although the mix is done out of house, Petok says the supervising editor "adds a lot of environmental sound" to sequences. Both recorded ambience and sound ef- fects "give viewers a real feeling of being in the desert" with the contestants. "Each series has its own dynamics, but we've been fi le-based for more than three-and-a-half years, so we're very comfortable with the process and we continue to evolve it," Palatnick says. "Since Steve Austin's Broken Skull Chal- lenge is eff ectively a controlled set, we don't have the issues you get in docu-fol- low shows, but just the sheer amount of footage is a big challenge." AMERICAN IDOL Thirteen years ago, Hollywood's Chain- saw, Inc. (www.chainsawedit.com) cut the concert footage for the American Idol fi nalist's tour at the end of the Fox series' fi rst season. Then the company was invited back to edit the returning series, and the rest is history. "Each year, for a decade, the production grew with more cities, more producers, more contestants," says Bill DeRonde, president of Chainsaw and supervising editor for American Idol, which stars host Ryan Seacrest and current judges Jennifer Lopez, Harry Connick Jr. and Keith Urban. "For years, it had a simple documentary style that looked real, unproduced and raw. Then it got more highly produced and polished with more of an editorial style to it. As it grew with more producers, we added more editors to achieve our goals; this year we have eight to 10 staff editors, Colorist Josh Petok (right) relies on Symphony and Resolve to create the look of CMT's Steve Austin's Broken Skull Challenge (far left and above).