DEFINITION December 2018

POST STORY | FANTAST I C BEASTS 2

WORKING WITH BEASTS For the new Fantastic Beasts movie, Technicolor managed a huge and complex pipeline from dailies to deliverables

QUESTIONS JULI AN M ITCHELL / PICTURES WARNER BROS

Definition: What was the Technicolor dailies process? How were colour decisions made and what about the data flow with the ARRI Alexa 65 camera? Technicolor: When we first heard that we were working with the Alexa 65, we needed to determine whether the system would use the industry adopted A65 workflow, which involved creating a proxy file with the Codex Vault and do the dailies out of them. Or if there was some way of working with the original camera files as we do with all other cameras. As we are vendor agnostic, we don’t influence the camera or formats that productions use. We instead work to provide solutions and normalise our processes to accommodate to their needs. Our aim is to provide the same speed, level of service and quality in every scenario. We always try to do this by working with the original camera files. For Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald , we did just that by building a system that can process Alexa 65 material with the same turnaround times and level of quality our clients are accustomed to.

We knew early on that we needed to build something completely new. We didn’t want to create something that we were going to use only once; we wanted to create something long lasting that could be integrated with our pipeline and processes going forward. Our engineers in London and Los Angeles worked with us and FilmLight to build a completely new system, integrating our dailies software with their Daylight system. This enabled us to bring together FilmLight’s hardware and software ability in processing original Alexa 65 files with the versatility and standardisation we have achieved over the years using our proprietary Technicolor Dailies Manager Systems. We ended up building a system for Fantastic Beasts 2 that was capable of processing original Alexa 65 Raw files at full debayer. We were able to bring to our clients a service where acquiring, processing and backing up Alexa 65 data feels much like a normal Alexa SXT workflow, with the added bonus that we were effectively QC-ing their actual OCN.

26 DEF I N I T ION | DECEMBER 20 1 8

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