DEFINITION February 2018

FEATURE 4K CONCERT

grade, it was more the extremes of the concert itself and the lighting cues. It has some real extremes of lighting. The song Run like Hell for example, visually it’s quite an assault on the senses, very intense; the band literally wear sunglasses all the way through otherwise nobody would be able to see properly as there is so much strobe. All throughout the show there is a lot of strobe and plenty of smoke. The whole thing is very theatrical in the way it has been lit, with a lot of very hard contrast ratios on the stage between different musicians and David under a spotlight. “All of those things contributed in making a naturalistic look across the grade that was much more complex. I did a grade quite a few years ago with Duran Duran, with that one we just went for a predetermined look with some black and white, a bit of film grain, some damage: there was no real rule book other than to make the band look cool. For this one we’re trying to give it a considered aesthetic and nothing was to be crushed too far or oversaturated or too far away from what it really looked like. “This was a very difficult show to shoot, there is a lot of musicality on stage that needs covering

a starting point with that flat look. That’s what I gave to Gavin to use for the offline edit. When it came back to me we could re-link everything via XML straight in to Resolve; of course that was five months later. We did a quick couple of grades after the relief of finding that everything links back but didn’t do the bulk of the grading for another four months. The whole project has taken about a year from the initial shooting through to the first screening.” GRADE HARD Grading the concert had to match all the different cameras and lenses and deal with the enormous contrast of the footage. “The Sony 4300 and box lenses just inherently have a different look even with the kind of compressed nature of the box lens,” says James, “and shooting from that kind of distance, I find the more compressed XAVC codecs harder to work with, in Raw you’ve got so much more you can play with in the highlights. The XAVC has to be right, has to be on it. If you over expose or someone loses it by a couple of stops, it’s much harder to pull things back. “But really the Gamut of different cameras wasn’t the complexity in the

Gavin the director wanted to keep a naturalistic look to the show, he didn’t want to overly stylize it or get too far away from the original lit look. Actually as soon as you shot in a Raw or log format we brought the two nights’ worth of footage in to my Resolve set-up which could read all these different formats. Sony F55 raw, XAVC, Redcode, DJI DNG, H,264. Resolve is my go-to tool as it will read everything to start with so it meant we could organise everything and then use the Media Management to proxy everything down to 2K and HD proxies. “At that point I flattened everything as well in terms of looks to Slog2, so basically we had

ABOVE Pompeii’s Roman amphitheatre lit up by fireworks. BELOW James brought all the concert footage in to his Resolve set-up.

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