Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/724677
PRIMETIME www.postmagazine.com 11 POST SEPTEMBER 2016 important things was, we wanted to be in all of those places. It's kind of like watching a travel show. There's no point in shooting these beautiful locations if you don't in some way — even though there are awful things going on — you don't make the viewer go, 'Oh man, I kind of want to be there.'" Did you work in a linear fashion, starting with Episode 1? "We played with all six episodes in a very rough state and then a couple of months later, I started on Episode 1, and worked all the way through in a linear way. That doesn't always happen. And I already had a skeleton to work from." What were your delivery expectations? "We didn't deliver them all at once, but I think we did deliver them all before they went out. We had a very tight delivery because we had to get Episode 1 and 2 ready for the Berlin Film Festival to premiere there. We also made a DCP version for the film festival." What tools are you relying on for your color work? "We use the (Digital Vision) Nucoda Film Master. We also have (Blackmagic Design's DaVinci) Resolve here, which I also drive. Those happen to be the two systems that we have in-house. I am pretty agnostic when it comes to systems. We find that for TV work, the Nucoda suits our work a little better. We tend to use the Resolve for the DI work we do. That would be in our film theater. You pick the right tool for the job, and for DI, the Resolve seems to work better for us." How much time could you spend on each episode? "We had three days per episode, and then because the DOP wasn't present, we'd then send out copies to him and to the various executives to watch, and they would give me notes, and I would have a further session to correct [those] notes. Around three or three-and-a-half days per episode." Is that enough? "It's never enough (laughs)! It was fine. It was enough time. They were not constrained particularly by budget, so I'm sure if I needed more time, we could have got it." What kind of feedback are you getting in regards to changes? "You have to remember that it's the first time that they've seen their show with real color and in proper resolution. Before then, they had probably been looking at an offline copy. They are go- ing to see more than they've ever seen. They are going to really start to see that the color — much like a script of words — they need to see that [it's] working, along with the descriptive words. A col- or script kind of tells a story in the same way as the words do. They are meant to hold hands. And then the sound comes and they have to do the same thing. Their feedback is really making sure that those two things meet — that the emo- tional beats are in the right place — that we are not too dark and losing expres- sion, or that we are too bright and losing that sense of drama. People have a lot of different ideas about how to make things work. We had one director the whole way through and she was incredi- bly focused about what she wanted." What kind of files were you working with? "It was a UHD project, so it was cap- tured at 4K and we worked in 4K all the way through the facility. Generally, they are converted to DPX for me and debayered somewhere else, and then I get them. I believe we worked in DPX, so from my memory, things got debay- ered. Saying that, we have worked di- rectly with the Red files and that works just as well." Does the camera choice influence you creatively? "People ask me quite a lot whether I prefer Red or Alexa, or any other camera system, and I don't actually. I think what was nice about this being Red was we were able to do different things with it. And I think it looks different. I don't know if that was one of the choices for using it. I think that it's important to use different camera systems to get different looks. I don't know about the States, but in Europe, Alexa is the predominant camera for drama. I think Red got a reputation for being hard to work with. From a post production point of view, it's not a struggle at all. We are in that nice position now where we all kind of know what we are doing with digital capture and how to post produce it. And I think we now can just use the right tool for the job." The six-part series was shot using Red cameras. Tom Hiddleston stars as Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager. Night Manager. Night Color is used to help define the show's international locations. Beyond grading, Encore provided sound and online effects services.