Sundance Film Festival

NY post facility Postworks touched a lot films at Sundance–in some cases in an instrumental way. Just ask Alex Vlack and Andrew Zuckerman who appear in the NY Lounge as if on cue to rave about their screening and how pristine their short High Falls looked. “We wouldn’t be here without Joe,” they say, and it’s not a plug. They talk about the other films and how soft their prints looked, how people were complaining about 3:2 pulldown (”which we didn’t have to worry about) and how if the other filmmakers had been fortunate enough to have a professional finish and filmout their films would have looked just as good. They’re trying to be generous but you can tell they’re so pleased to be rising above the competition with their Varicam-shot film.

Anyway, I’m actually here in the NY Lounge to talk about Postworks workflow on Padre Nuestro with DP Igor Martinovic and Postworks’ Joe Beirne. It was a collaboration of mutual benefit: Martinovic says the show got a beautiful DI and Joe Beirne got to put his facility through the paces of an interesting new workflow–one he believes he will be able to standardize on for features. This workflow includes two important factors: the use of a full RGB 4:4:4 scan as the basis for the DI and an end to end dailies-offiline workflow based on Avid DNX. If you want to hear all about it from Postworks Joe Beirne, Avid‘s Matt Feury, and representatives from Arri, be sure to stop by the NY Lounge.

This was not an easy film. Beirne and Martinovic take turns explaining how nuances of darkness were crucial to the narrative. Dark is a gamble for any DP, much less one working with a tight budget and tight schedule, shooting Super 35 in a run-and-gun style. Padre Nuestro had a lot of night shots and a deliberate ambiguity about characters at various points in the story–so it was literally peering into the darkness. “The shadow areas had to be tightly controlled,” Beirne says.

“The technical process had to live up to that,” Beirne continues. It was a situation that would benefit greatly from HD dailies and now Martinovic is spoiled. The workflow also gave Postworks a chance to try doing the DI from a 4:4:4 scan.

This experiment yielded some lessons, here’s Beirne laying it out:

“The precise workflow is that a flat technical pass was done from 35mm neg to HDCAM SR and at the same time a fully-corrected dailies pass was laid down in 4:2:2 (to HDCAM and then to DNX HD). Ira Schweitzer was the dailies colorist. (Igor and Ira decided to apply a slight bias to the SR master as well: we probably didn’t need to do that.) Ira’s dailies correction was used for the edit and for all the previews. Igor had a mechanical problem with one of the cameras during production and we analyzed that problem directly from the SR transfer: we didn’t need to print or put the film back up.

“We didn’t use Ira’s dailies grade as a starting place for the DI,” Beirne continues. “Scot Olive the DI colorist and Igor and director Chris Zalla worked on the correction in the context of the cut on a 2K DLP projector using one of our print emulation LUTs. Occasionally Igor or Chris would decide they liked what Ira had done better than where they had gone in the DI, and we would go back and match to Ira’s dailies look, but Scot started from a completely blank slate and I think that is a good idea when you are working with two colorists.”

Next up: DNX to DI: in search of an affordable indie dailies/offline workflow