News

August 22, 2013

8G Postproduction Workshop, a Shanghai based postproduction company, has colored the first season of the Chinese version of the hit television singing reality show “I Am A Singer” with DaVinci Resolve.

The popular reality show airs on Friday night on Hunan TV, and each episode of “I Am A Singer” is shot on 38 cameras with different settings and various recording formats. Like any other weekly reality show, “I Am A Singer” has a very tight production schedule. The postproduction team had to create a 90 minute program out of 400 hours of footage within 8 days, with less than 20 hours allowed for color grading. 8G Postproduction Workshop deployed three DaVinci Resolves for this project.

The schedule was tight but some processes were time consuming. “Sometimes our colorists had to split the large media files from the editing team into individual shots before color grading. Fortunately, DaVinci Resolve’s automatic scene cut detection feature saved us time,” said Weida Xu, manager and colorist of 8G Postproduction Workshop. “If we got the EDL or XML, we could connect Resolve to the client’s SAN for conforming. Though there were many different formats, Resolve allowed native grading without the need for transcoding.”

Unlike a feature film or commercial shot following a pre written script on a controllable set, a reality show always attempts to record what really happens, even under poor conditions, which tends to result in shots with incorrect white balance or color casts. These problems had to be fixed in Resolve shot by shot. “Resolve’s real time processing ensures our efficiency,” said Xu. “Besides global color correction, we were also able to use many efficient secondary tools in Resolve for color corrections within a limited area. For example, we might need to track a person moving fast from point A to B. With Resolve’s automatic tracking feature, all we had to do is select the object, create the key frames and Resolve will automatically finish the rest of a very complicated tracking, which allowed us to further improve our production value within limited time.”

When they were done with color grading, the colorists also needed to check if there were any shots neglected. “DaVinci Resolve has a ‘Timeline Management’ functionality that helped us spot uncolored shots out of thousands of shots, perfect for TV shows with a number of shots or long form projects,” said Xu.

“Most colorists enter the field by learning Resolve because it perfectly matches colorists’ thinking. Its YRGB processing is a good example, which allows the colorist to precisely control blacks, midtones and highlights. Plus, DaVinci Resolve’s node based processing is more intuitive and allows you to master it easily,” added Xu.

Press Photography

Product photos of all Blackmagic Design products, 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.

Adobe has released an update for Premiere Pro CS6, previous generation of its acclaimed non-linear video editor. The 6.0.4 update provides a number of important fixes addressing AVCHD clip spanning and the warp stabilizer. Adobe recommend all users install this update (Mac OS X, Windows). Now it is also possible to upgrade directly to Adobe Premiere Pro CC, newly available as a Single App plan purchase!

Two-time Emmy award recipient, Toon Boom Animation Inc. announced the release of Toon Boom Studio 8, its flagship animation software for hobbyists. This new version is packed with easy-to-use features that make traditional animation, cut-out-animation and bones animation a breeze. In addition, Studio 8 includes new lip-sync tools and impressive special effects.

For Autodesk Maya 2014, Autodesk Mudbox 2014 and Autodesk 3ds Max 2014 software customers with current Autodesk Subscription, the latest extensions will be available on September 16th (Maya, and Mudbox), and September 30th (3ds Max), respectively. The Extension for Autodesk Maya 2014 software will bring the XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator for creating hair, fur, feathers, grass, foliage, and other instanced data; a new retopology toolset; new robust and efficient Boolean operations; and enhancements to the Bullet physics plug-in. The Extension for Autodesk Mudbox 2014 software enables to create topologically symmetrical meshes while retopologizing, or from an existing mesh, and a new Caliper tool that helps to accurately measure the distance between two points in linear space, or along a curve. The Extension for Autodesk 3ds Max 2014 software adds the ability to import and visualize massive point cloud datasets, new support for Python scripting, and a Stereo Camera feature set.

Blackmagic Design today announced that DaVinci Resolve was used for color correction on the coming of age comedy “The Kings of Summer.” Distributed in the US by CBS Films, the indie darling, which premiered to rave reviews at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and opened in theaters across the US on May 31, tells the story of three teenage friends who decide to spend their summer building a house in the woods and living off the land.

Hollywood based production and post production facility, Blacklist Digital, worked closely with Director Jordan Vogt Roberts from pre production, creating data workflows, handling data storage and on set transcoding, as well as testing the workflow through to post to ensure the resulting footage delivered on Jordan’s vision.

“We used Resolve for much of the pre production process,” said Tims Johnson, owner of Blacklist Digital. “From the beginning, we were ingesting footage, color testing and creating dailies with Resolve. We had footage from two different cameras mixed, so the ingest was transcoded to Avid DNxHD 36 footage that was later reconnected back to RAW. Resolve is very good at supporting multiple file formats and allows us to pretty much link anything we want. Working in RAW and having access to metadata is very important for us in post.”

Once in post, Blacklist Digital’s Head Colorist, Narbeh Tatoussian, was tasked with creating a cinematic, picturesque and vintage look for the film. Narbeh benefitted from Resolve’s unlimited nodes, often using upwards of 10, and sometimes even up to 20 nodes on the majority of the shots. Resolve’s unlimited node based image processing, where each node can have color correction, Power Windows and effects, provided Narbeh with the creative freedom to achieve a truly artistic look.

In one particular scene, the further the actors travel into the forest, the more the mood changes, and the color of the forest changes to reflect it. Resolve allowed Narbeh to create very specific looks and subtly change the colors of the leaves and trees by fine tuning the greens.

“By having the metadata and powerful tools available in Resolve to bring the reds out while taking the yellows down, it was more like painting instead of traditional color correction. I was able to track four different Power Windows in one mask and have a 12 node setup where five of the nodes were tracking. And it was all in 4K on P3 color space RAW in real time, which is amazing,” said Narbeh. “During the conform, I composited grain on top of the color correction and was able to control it to create just the right cinematic look. People even asked if it was shot on film because it looked so authentic.”

Because the footage was shot with an anamorphic lens, Narbeh was also responsible for creating a cinematic depth of field in the montage sequences, which he achieved using a combination of curves with color picking, blurring, sharpening and mist in Resolve.

“The tools are all there in Resolve to help you creatively deliver on what the director and DP want, you just have to use your imagination,” concluded Narbeh.

Press Photography

Product photos of Blackmagic Design products 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.