25
TOMB RAIDER GRADE STORY
in Resolve, which allowed us to replicate the colour work done on set by Josh, often utilising multiple nodes beyond that of the primary.” “With Tomb Raider , what helped immensely was the ability to create a custom metadata view for media processing, whilst retaining all the metadata for exports for editorial,” Allan continues. “This allowed us to focus on the main tags required by Company 3, yet also gave us flexibility with editorial’s requirements. The fact that Resolve is now a fully-fledged NLE means we could process any small editorial requests: a massive time saver, as we didn’t need to jump into another application or render out proxies before fulfilling these occasional requests.” Techniques developed throughout the Tomb Raider project have now been incorporated into The Refinery’s day-to-day workflow. “Attention to detail was integral,” reflects Allan. “We now set up custom metadata views as part of our standard procedure, even when jobs aren’t going to utilise media sharing platforms. It helps operators focus on many details at a glance, and enables us to move more quickly through the initial stages of any workflow.” Once filming was completed in South Africa, and dailies delivered, the crew flew to the UK for the final leg of the shoot, with Greg Fisher at Company 3 London completing the final DI.
“Having an entire dailies department on any large job is essential,” Joshua comments. “The volume of material, sheer number of cameras and number of units requires sizeable, dedicated dailies teams that can run 24/7 whenever and wherever it is needed.” Ensuring that George’s vision translated all the way through the colour pipeline fell to Joshua . “We had to find a system that would allow for a smooth transition between Cape Town and London. DaVinci Resolve acted as a base for this, with both companies reproducing dailies based on the colour information passed on from set,” he says. The Refinery took responsibility for the first section of dailies. After wrap each day, Joshua delivered a Resolve project and rushes to the lab. Allan Taylor, dailies colourist at The Refinery would then log and sync pictures and audio to populate his colour timelines, relying on Resolve’s support of custom metadata to process the media, whilst retaining all the metadata needed for editorial exports. “When we were happy that everything was logged correctly we ran off the various soft deliverables, including editorial MXF files and viewing dailies,” explains Allan. “Where anomalies were found, I would rebuild timelines based on new bin structures to accommodate new footage. In these instances, we would use the ColorTrace feature
WE HAD TO FIND A SYSTEM THAT WOULD ALLOW FOR A SMOOTH TRANSITION BETWEEN CAPE TOWN AND LONDON
matrix,” he explains. “This allowed me to feed graded or log images to the monitors and scopes, while also distributing pictures to the relevant departments. Working with George, we used SmallHD OLED monitors on the cameras, which I sent a graded return feed to, so he could light his shots and refine that lighting set-up if required.” Transitioning between live colour and dailies colour, Joshua found this approach allowed him to work more efficiently. “Using Resolve, I can work at an incredible speed; the software is very intuitive when it comes to colour. My project is organised in a way that allows me to navigate through hundreds of hours of material and pinpoint what I need quickly,” he comments. “Meanwhile, the colour tab allows me to match material and – when needed – work into the image further with secondary corrections to enhance a shot. All of this can be fed easily through to the dailies team who then process the colour information and pass the soft deliverables on to editorial and marketing.” photography, equalling 186 hours of footage processed through Joshua’s on-set rig, having a dailies team in South Africa as well as the UK was an important contributing factor to the smooth running of the colour pipeline. TERABYTES With 180TB of principal
IMAGES The movie was shot partly in Cape Town, partly in London.
@DEFINITIONMAGAZINE |
@DEFINITIONMAGS |
@DEFINITIONMAGS
MAY 2018 DEFINITION
Powered by FlippingBook