Def Tech’s New Ultra HD Music Video, “Marathon,” Graded with DaVinci Resolve – Press Release

November 1, 2013

Blackmagic Design announced that record breaking vocal duo Def Tech’s music video for “Marathon” was graded with DaVinci Resolve. The video for the song is one of Japan’s first Ultra HD in 60p music videos and was color corrected and finished at Tokyo based post production house IMAGICA.

Def Tech is a vocal duo that sold more than 2 million of their debut album as an indie artist and have continued to be one of Japan’s most popular musical groups. “Marathon” is included on their latest album, “24/7.” Def Tech teamed up with IMAGICA to create a high quality music video in Ultra HD 60p that showed the duo singing in a dark environment with strong lighting and various weather effects.

IMAGICA is one of Japan's leading production companies and offers shooting, computer graphics and post production services for all types of visual work. The “Marathon” music video was produced to promote Ultra HD in Japan, as well as the duo’s song itself, and was first shown on an 84 inch Ultra HD monitor at Production Expo 2013 held in Tokyo.

For “Marathon”, the production team used ONSET DOCK, a mobile on set grading system designed by IMAGICA and based around DaVinci Resolve. ONSET DOCK allows a director or cinematographer to create the basic look and feel of a video and then allows the them to check footage against base color schemes created with DaVinci Resolve.

“The director for the music video requested we give it a cool, edgy look,” said Asako Harada, colorist, Data Imaging Team, TV Commercial Production Unit at IMAGICA. “I aimed to show off Def Tech’s faces when they are singing to bring out their charm. With Resolve, I could pull out the details of the high quality images, such as the facial expressions when they are singing and the clouds in the background, while I darkened the black for more contrast.”

The video shoot took place outside with the duo standing in strong lighting and artificial rain, while professional athletes and performers, such as skateboarders and break dancers, performed around them. The performance captured by the 4K cameras and the bluish contrasty look developed in Resolve gave a dynamic image to the music video.

Even though the director changed some shots in the timeline during the grading session, grading took around six hours. “Resolve was very responsive when using the control surface, so it really didn’t matter if I was grading in high resolution images. Rendering was a lot faster than I have expected.”

“One of the unique challenges of this video was the very strong lighting. Initially, I was boosting the level to add more contrast, but then the highlight level of the lighting inverted. But I fixed the problem quickly in Resolve using a tone curve. Resolve has a wide variety of tools I can pick and use so that I can cope well with any problems that come at me like this,” Harada continued. “This music video does not have many colors; however I did not want to give it just a simple monochrome tone. I wanted to show many emotions in the video, so I made many versions to show my client and was able to give the director the exact look he was looking for.”

Kenjiro Yamada of the Data Imaging Team, TV Commercial Production Unit at IMAGICA, said, “With Ultra HD, it is very time consuming and complex work in terms of data management. Ultra HD in 60P is 10 times more data than regular HD 24P material. It takes an immense amount of time to just move data between drives. So initially, we used DaVinci Resolve to make Quick Time files for offline from RAW camera footage. This was a huge advantage for us, since after the conversion and making backups, the rest of the workflow is the same because we use proxies for offline editing.“

He continued, “There are so many types of video formats, and we are expected to handle everything. Resolve helps us because it supports a wide variety of files and codecs, and also it always adds support for new formats as very quickly.”

About DaVinci Resolve

Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve is the world’s highest performance on set, editing and color correction solution for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux computers. DaVinci Resolve supports more real time color correction than any other system because it’s not limited by the performance of the computer it’s running on. DaVinci Resolve eliminates this performance barrier because it’s based on a cluster of high performance GPU cards, so all processing is always real time. DaVinci Resolve has the power of a true real time performance solution so handles complex color grades even when using dozens of primaries, secondaries, Power Windows™, multi point tracking, blurs, and more. DaVinci Resolve provides incredible performance in a low cost solution which can be easily upgraded by adding extra GPUs for supercomputer power to handle 4K resolutions, stereoscopic 3D and real time grading direct from raw camera files such as ARRI RAW, RED RAW and Sony RAW files which can be handled with ease.

Press Photography

Product photos of DaVinci Resolve are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/press/images.

About Blackmagic Design

Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and film restoration software for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including stereoscopic 3D and 4K workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. For more information, please check www.blackmagicdesign.com.