DOCUMENTARY | OUR PLANET
RIGHT Series producer Alastair Fothergill and Sir David Attenborough take a seat
terms of workflow, it turned things on its end; you’re doing things in a different order from what you’re used to.” BASELIGHT CONFORM The core of the whole video post became the company’s Baselight grading suite; when it was picture locked at the end of the offline edit it was conformed into Baselight and then shots came out of there into other software in different suites to do other jobs and then back in to Baselight to be colour graded and finished. The grade itself was a huge undertaking and relied firstly on specific producers’ needs for specific scenes, but overall the series brief was to make it look ‘really beautiful’. Franz again: “There were two episodes in particular that were underwater, Fresh Water and High Seas . They definitely provided the greatest challenges in the
grade. For all the normal reasons, the cameras were struggling to a certain extent the deeper they went underwater, but the expectation was that those images would look just as good as the stuff shot above water. They needed the most work in the grade. “For the majority of the work we used the phrase ‘image enhancement’ which included a great deal of image stabilisation, especially in certain environments – for instance anything that was shot in the arctic tended to be affected by the extremely windy weather and shot on a long lens which exaggerates any camera wobble. There was also a fair amount of noise reduction where things were shot in low light; for instance in the Jungles episode they were quite often filming under a dense canopy, with not enough sunlight coming through so those shots needed a lot of help
in post. We did a great deal of that general cleanup work. Post producer Miles Hall says, “There was also a lot of dirt which had to be cleaned up off the camera lens or off the sensor itself. Again, as the expectations were particularly high for this series, then we had to work harder than normal.” HDR is unremitting when you’re talking about dirt and general location problems. “In the past when working in SDR we might have got away with certain issues.In HDR everything was there to be seen. Sensor dust for instance only became visible when you pushed the pictures in the HDR grade.” Again, as the expectations were particularly high for this series, we had to work harder than normal OUR PLANET IS CURRENTLY STREAMING WORLDWIDE ON THE NETFLIX PLATFORM
26 DEF I N I T ION | MAY 20 1 9
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