POST-PRODUCTION
CRACKING THE CODE The Blackmagic Cloud Store offered an extra layer of safety and convenience for everyone involved
“We came back from the US three months later with 55TB of Raw footage, from which we had generated 20TB of proxies,” says Frick. “That would still be a huge amount of proxy data to copy onto a hard drive to send to someone – but we didn’t have to wait for computers to do the job. We already had most of the stories we had shot in a rough first edit using those proxies. “The project is always online, you can access it from anywhere,” he adds. “If you can’t come into the office, you can keep on working. As well as efficiency, there’s safety in the cloud backup. You don’t need to care about having hard drives backed up in three different places. “This is a low-budget show in every aspect. It’s tough to take on more days just because something’s not working; in the end, you will pay for them yourself. So those three points – speed, safety and budget – all came together to inform our workflow choices.”
“The show’s visual style is underlined by its density and subdued midtones, with the highlights being quite flat, which minimised any clipping,” he adds. “While the approach varies from episode to episode, the overall result is a cohesive look and feel, unifying all 40 shorts.” Wolf used plenty of Resolve FX, such as Light Rays, Lens Flares, Halation and Film Grain to spice up the stories. “Using the DaVinci toolset is always fun and a bit like playing piano,” he continues. “Even when a scene looks a little weak, there is something in the box to make it stunning.” Thanks to Blackmagic Cloud’s Presentations, members of the team could watch a live grading session remotely. The collaborative workflow also included external sound dubbing sessions in a Munich studio, with Diener exporting AAF and H.264 files from Resolve and receiving the TV stereo mix and audio stems back in Resolve for the final master and delivery. “Using software so cutting edge and designed to work collaboratively helped on a project like this,” concludes Frick. “I doubt we could have done that with any other software out there.”
THOSE THREE POINTS – speed, safety and budget – CAME TOGETHER TO INFORM OUR CHOICES” “The team from Superama prepared the timelines for each story, and I had a Shuttle XL RAID drive with a copy of all the footage. I simply changed the source path once and everything was online,” explains Wolf. “The cloud workflow saved a lot of time. It was a great experience thanks to the variety of stories. I colour- managed the material, crafting a unique set of colour grades for each episode.
ONE TOOL TO MASTER THEM ALL
VFX, including creature effects and gunshots, were outsourced – though DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Fusion page was deployed for numerous post fixes. “Masking, plus screen and logo replacements, are all simplified due to Resolve’s Magic Mask,” explains Till Diener, digital producer at Superama. I’d draw on an object and then Magic Mask will automatically track the whole thing. Or if there’s a person in the background I want removed, I can draw over it, which then gets replaced throughout the sequence.” Meanwhile, Diener would route jobs to colourist Florian Wolf, who returned to grade Season 6. “With everyone able to work on the same project file at the same time, we didn’t have to give the colourist a DRT or XML, or rely on any intermediary codecs,” explains Diener.
THE RIGHT TOOL Part of Fusion’s effective usability is owed to its built-in tools, allowing seamless movement between edits
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