POST-PRODUCTION
CLOUD-BASED PROXY WORKFLOW A unique media transfer and post workflow using Blackmagic Cloud was developed for Season 5 and enhanced for Season 6. It involved backing up the daily rushes and transferring to a 100TB RAID station each night in LA, with proxies generated using Blackmagic’s Proxy Generator App. This checked a designated watch folder on the 100TB drive every 20 seconds. “You only need to set it up once,” explains Holger. “After that, as we back up media from SSDs or CFast cards onto a hard drive, the Proxy Generator would then automatically generate the proxies and send them to a designated folder on our Dropbox. “Every day, someone in Munich would check the proxy files first thing and transfer the material for each new story into the cloud project to be edited. So just a week or two after we started shooting, the editing process had already started in Germany using DaVinci Resolve.” Superama leveraged Blackmagic Cloud Pod – allowing three remote editors to collaborate seamlessly. For this season, the organisation added the Blackmagic Cloud Store 20TB networked storage for media syncing with Dropbox and Google Drive.
S ometimes, fact is stranger than fiction. At least, that’s the premise at the heart of Beyond Belief , a cult TV show that originally aired on the Fox network between 1997 and 2002. A huge hit in Germany, where it’s known as X-Factor: Das Unfassbare , the show was hosted by Jonathan Frakes (of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame) and followed an episodic anthology format. Each new instalment featured a series of dramatised stories about supernatural goings on, paranormal phenomena and urban legends. Some were complete fabrications, others based on truth. The viewer’s job was decide which was which. To coincide with the show’s 25th anniversary, German broadcaster RTL Zwei commissioned Superama Superama Filmproduktions revives a cult classic – with a little help from DaVinci Resolve and Blackmagic Cloud
Filmproduktions and Wiedemann & Berg Television for eight new episodes, first premiering on Halloween 2021. The revival was such a success that the production companies were tasked with creating another series, once again shot in English and dubbed in German. Season 6 was shot last summer, with showrunner and Superama co-founder Holger Frick; W&B executive producer Benjamin Munz; and RTL Zwei executive producer Gerhard Putz joining DOP Edward Salerno Jr in LA. The team deployed a couple of Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12Ks and a Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro, utilising Blackmagic Raw to take full advantage of the compressed Raw workflow and wider latitude. Meanwhile, shooting in 12K was reserved for specific scenes, while 8K and 6K resolutions were used to preserve highlights, blacks and grain. “The diversity of our shorts – each filmed in a single day and tailored to the unique needs of each story – truly exemplifies the saying ‘it takes a village’, with each individual playing a crucial role in the production,” introduces the DOP, Salerno Jr. “As an anthology series with no unified visual style, our challenge was to integrate the distinct visions of our eight directors with my own aesthetic preferences.”
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