AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER PRODUCTION.
had experience of it, he felt grateful to work with Park Road Post, which had previously worked on The Hobbit films. The company’s editor, Tim Willis, was the DI editor for Avatar: The Way of Water . “He’d worked on The Hobbit trilogy, so he understood the challenges of working at 48fps from a post-production standpoint,” explains Trieu. “Production editorial worked at 24fps in a more traditional Avid workflow, so they turned over 24fps EDLs [edit decision lists] and reference picture. We learned that we could easily conform the film at 24fps from our 48-frame source material and essentially copy and paste that into a 48-frame timeline – and voilà, you have a 48-frame project now.” Willis was instrumental in helping the production navigate those challenges, allowing Trieu to focus on the colour aspects of the film rather than technical “We’re playing on hard mode. Coming back to a traditional 2D movie with one format and one frame rate feels so quaint in comparison”
A PIECE OF THE PUZZLE Changes in decisions on frame rates throughout the production process left the post-production crew with a mishmash of standards and file types to piece together
and editorial minutiae. “We’re dealing with a mix of true-24 material, true-48 material and 24-frame material in a 48-frame container – where essentially every frame is double-printed – and that workflow worked well for us from an EDL-editorial standpoint. Timecode worked a little bit better in a 48-frame format,” says Trieu. “Most people are used to a single time base, a single- camera format, a single delivery format. We’re playing on hard mode in every
49. MARCH 2023
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