Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/691665
PRIMETIME www.postmagazine.com 17 POST JUNE 2016 even there, it was a greenscreen. It's not like we're going to find a 1948 Pan Am plane just sitting around for us. We also, obviously, didn't shoot in [the Palace of] Versailles. That was also a completely-CG model. We have a visual effects supervi- sor (Briscoe) now working on the show full-time and he works directly with our VFX vendors. We just went to the next level this season and we absolutely love having his perspective, eye and talent. It's really made the process a lot smoother." I loved in the first episode of Season 2, the transition that happens when Claire is getting off the plane at New York's LaGuardia airport and she is reaching out to her husband and suddenly, she's in France with Jamie. "Oh yeah, and with that score, that was one of my favorite scenes. Get the tis- sues out [laughs]. If you saw the actual location, it's this tiny little harbor with no buildings. That's a great scene." Are you using previs? "Yes, we used it for the Versailles scenes. We had to combine not only the digital mapping of each of the build- ings, but Richard also had to arrange the shoot with the horses and the peo- ple and carriages that were going to be put in against greenscreen. We used photogrammetry and previs to try and match it with the director's [footage], using Ncam. They meshed, overlaid the CG Versailles." How much has the workflow changed from the first season to the second season? "Last season, we shot on Arri Alexa (using ProRes 4:4:4 and delivering in 4:2:2) cam- eras. This season, we switched to the Arri Amira in UHD for the first seven episodes — the 'Paris episodes' I call them. That was something we all wanted to try — to take that next step, and it turned out really well. I think the footage looks great. And then for the last episodes, we switched to the Sony [PMW-] F55 [CineAlta] cameras and started shooting in full 4K. Going full 4K, that's kind of the ultimate goal for all shows now." So, that's what drove that change, the 4K? "Yes, everybody's moving towards that 4K world. We switched over, too. The F55 was the best fit for our crew. We still shoot a lot in Scotland, or Paris for exteri- ors, and we did do a shoot in Prague. But there's still a lot of stuff in Scotland and the weather there is pretty intense. We have the gladiator of crews. They want- ed to make sure they had a camera that could withstand the Scottish weather." How is the footage moving through the pipeline? "Both processes are fairly similar. With the Amira, we process the dailies ourselves in Scotland, where we have a wonderful crew out there that includes our post supervisor, dailies assist and colorist. They create the LUTs on-set with our DIT and then it goes to our colorist. For the F55, we end up doing a dual recording for our dailies, and then the 4K would come straight to our colorist at MTI Film in LA. Our colorist processes everything there. I also have my other staff here in LA, which is my post supervisor Michelle Mason, our post coordinator Bryce Scherer-Brian, my co, co-producer [and editor] Michael O'Halloran and the editors." What are you using to cut on, as well as for color and finishing? "We are editing on Avid, Version 7 right now. Color is Nucoda, which was new for me on this show. It works really well. Steven Porter (MTI Film), our colorist, is amazing. Every century or decade has a different look. I don't know if you read the books, but there are a lot more decades and centuries coming up. Steven very much wants us to define the world each time we're in a new place, which is why Paris was so much fun. We got to really pump the color. We even had Terry [Dresbach], our costume designer, in for a color session. The red dress [worn by Claire] was a big deal. We had to make sure we got that just right. "We are all file-based this whole sea- son, no tape, and one of the things we are provided with is a massive FTP because we do pipe a lot of stuff back and forth. I can't even imagine how many terabytes we have of storage, but it's a lot, and we finish and send Starz a UHD file, because that's their delivery requirement now, not full 4K, and then we require an IMF final file for Sony archives." What about storage? Are you using ISIS? "Yes, here in the office we're using ISIS. I'm not sure if we're upgrading to NEXIS, maybe. That was one of the things we talked about when we switched from HD, knowing we were eventually moving into the 4K world — what do we do to store the drives? Do we store on drives like we were? Or, do we go with something like a NEXIS? We were looking into NAS storage, but at the time we didn't know the workflow, Outlander makes a time/location transition here, moving seamlessly from 1940s New York to 1740s Paris.