Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/559853
www.postmagazine.com 39 POST AUGUST 2015 4K HDR AND out. In order to be able to see everyone in the room, they might have to leave everything up and then of course they'll want to shape back down and get the normal style of the show back. The majority of the time it was Matt sort of dictating with his photography what he wanted, but there are things that went the other way. He wanted to make sure it stayed dark and so he would film it as dark as he possibly could and then my job would be the opposite, more about digging out eyes that were barely exposed. "In the end, it was very consistent — it was one of those things we didn't have to compromise much. Honestly, I thank the tools for that. A few years ago, I may have looked at it and said, 'I don't know. You're ask- ing for a lot here.'" Can you talk about Resolve? "It has unlimited node structure. A few years back, before these file-based color correctors, it was hardware, so you had to use like a videoboard for every layer of color... It was expensive and it maxed out at maybe four or five — and it didn't auto-track. Now, the system will actually sample a pixel, and will sample those pixels within the shape I've drawn. The computer knows auto-track, so it's constantly sampling. It's pretty amazing." Going back to what you were saying about the darkness of the episodes, it's such a fine line to get those scenes just right? "Yes, it's definitely a fine line. Steven wanted a very griddy, '70s kind of vibe. And the color palette he wanted was green and yellow — colors you'd see in the '70s. Matt Lloyd came up with everything to have this lemon/ lime palette and so he used these yellow gels, these yellow lights coming in the windows, but the sets themselves, the locations, didn't always have the lime, so a lot of times I would add the lime to the low lights and the blacks." A lot of shows are in 4K, but it's not across the board yet? "No, definitely not. We have a handful of shows here, but a majority are still HD. 4K is expensive because you're talking about a lot of file space and using up an entire SAN practically. Before, you'd have five or more shows on a single SAN. But the decision to go with 4K was probably driven more by Netflix because that's their standard delivery." How does the Resolve fit into the 4K workflow? "When I heard we were doing this show, we went out and upgraded Resolve. If I do a regular show on this thing now, it doesn't even blink. I can really pile on the effects in here. "Getting realtime is not particularly easy with 4K. Generally what a post house would do is generate HD proxies from those DPX files, so you have a UHD MAM or sampled show without color on it and then the assembled DPX files would get ingested into Resolve for color. And what you do is, you use HD proxies for color, you hit a single button, and it links back to the 4K media and so the big difference might be, if you see some alias thing on the edges on stuff, but visually, there's not going to be a jarring differ- ence between the two. You can color correct that way without there being a problem. And then generally you render, so you have to make sure you render back to 4K so the machine's processing the 4K media through all the effects you put on, then out again back to the SAN." What are some of the advantages of doing the show in 4K? "It depends on how it's shot, but there are certain things, like if you have a big skyline with city lights, in the background, with 4K with the depth that's added, you see every detail on every highlight. On Daredevil, there are shots of [Daredevil] on the rooftop and the camera kind of pans around and up, and one of the things I would do, I would key all the highlights in all the buildings, and the colors, and add 25 percent more contrast to those, which plays into the whole 4K thing. So when you're watching it, you're really getting the experience of that added depth." SPONSORED ADVERTORIAL: ALT SYSTEMS DELIVERING SEAMLESS HDR SOLUTIONS olorfront (www.colorfront.com), the Academy and Emmy Award- winning developer of high-performance, on-set dailies and transcod- ing systems for motion pictures, high-end episodic TV and commercials, presented its integrated HDR toolset earlier this month at Siggraph 2015. With this year's highly-publicized introduction of High Dynamic Range- capable displays from most of the leading television manufacturers at CES, there is a growing need to deliver an HDR version along with the standard range (SDR) deliverables. The dilemma is that currently there is no common standard for HDR delivery, amounting to a free-for-all, with each manufac- turer as well as service provider proposing their own unique solution. Furthermore, with the multitude of HDR-capable cameras, each with a unique color space, a common image workflow, independent of capture source and delivery specification, is needed. It is not practical to have inde- pendent, unique workflows for each capture format and delivery specifica- tion. Also, legacy color workflows are not able to maintain the wide range of colors, brightness, and contrast that are needed for a good HDR result. Colorfront has been demonstrating end-to-end HDR solutions at the major industry trade shows for over two years. And now, Colorfront Engine delivers the reliable and streamlined path from production into post that content creators vitally need. Once a look has been designed, it can easily be rendered to SDR and HDR with minimal trimming between the two and then an output transform converts it to the final delivery specifications. Colorfront Engine, a full 32-bit, floating point, high-performance managed image pipeline, is agnostic to source and delivery specifications and is based on the Academy ACES system. This allows for a single plug-and-play color workflow supporting both SDR and HDR. In fact, the system can simultane- ously render both SDR and HDR to multiple delivery specifications. This will allow the master to support today's specifications as well as future needs. In addition, the creative toolset within Colorfront Engine — including cam- era color, grading, master look library and look blender — works equally well with SDR and HDR. There are also HDR-specific tools to allow efficient, cre- ative adjustment to the upper high dynamic range to maintain the aesthetic integrity of the image as well as converting between HDR formats. Colorfront and ALT Systems, Colorfront's distributor in the Americas, exhibited at Siggraph for the first time this year. Also new for Siggraph 2015 was the introduction of Colorfront's Nuke plug-ins, giving full access to the Colorfront Engine in the VFX world. Colorfront, based in Budapest, Hungary, is one of Europe's leading DI and post production facilities. C