(Coral Springs, Florida--September 1, 2009) Producer-director Fredrik Hiller will be submitting his horror feature, "Psalm 21," on time for festival and distributor consideration thanks to leading post-production facility, Stockholm Postproduction and its da Vinci Resolve® digital mastering suite.
Equipped with version 6.2 software, the Resolve allowed lead colorist Carl Skaff to grade directly the film's native RED Raw digital motion picture files and eliminate the time-consuming .r3D-to-DPX file conversion process, saving him an estimated 120 hours of prerendering time. Because the film's final cut came in late, the time savings were critical to an on-time completion.
"It wasn't until I started grading that I realized the project would either have been impossible or very badly compromised if we had used any system but da Vinci," said Skaff, head of telecine at Stockholm Postproduction. "The number one biggest issue was that during offline, Hiller and the team relied heavily on digital animated zooms to enhance both the viewer experience and storyline — some of them over 100 percent — and we would have been forced to grade from a 1920x1080 source had it not been for the Resolve. Without Resolve's capabilities, the resulting images would either have been very low resolution and poor quality, or we would have had to manually zoom each clip in RedCine and render it out again — a colorist's nightmare."
Grading began with Skaff loading all source .r3D files onto the facility's Bright Systems SAN. Because .r3D files are uniquely compact, the result was a total of 12 hours of 4K content that required only 1TB of storage. Next, Skaff loaded each reel's EDL, which was instantly conformed by Resolve with 100 percent frame accuracy. Because he was grading the .r3D files directly, Skaff could see how the camera was set up by looking at the metadata from the individual shots, which he could then work from directly or use as a reference. Had he been working with converted files, this level of precise control would not have been possible.
The film's atmosphere is desolate and dark, with the images pushed toward a cold cyan tone. The result is that the finished product resembles a dark and foreboding fairytale filled with demons and other apparitions. Even with the film's extensive FX work, the entire grading process was completed in approximately six days.
"Grading with the native RED files has been super. It's not only the speed and being able to eliminate prerendering, but also that the grading experience felt very familiar, like working with film," added Director of Photography Andres Rignell, FSF. "The color range we had to work with included the whole spectrum, and the range of dynamics meant the highlights weren't blown out. In some cases, we were looking at scenes that had very low light levels, yet the images were almost noise free."
The producers are expecting "Psalm 21" to be widely released later this year.
About Stockholm Postproduction
Stockholm Postproduction is a leading European commercial post-production facility providing quality editing, visual effects, motion graphics, and color grading services. The facility has provided post-production services for Volvo, Burberry, Apoteket, Audi, Ikea, Subaru, Gucci, and other leading brands, as well as for feature films. For further information about Stockholm Postproduction, please visit http://www.stopp.se.
About da Vinci Systems®, LLC
da Vinci Systems is the leading provider of color enhancement and image restoration products used in post-production facilities worldwide. Incorporating the company's Emmy® Award-winning technology, da Vinci's products support SDTV, HDTV, data, and digital film. Since the introduction of the company's first color corrector in 1984, da Vinci has been a front-runner in the field of image enhancement, shaping color enhancement into the vital role it holds in post-production today. The company is headquartered in Coral Springs, Fla., with offices in Los Angeles, New York, London, France, Germany, and Singapore.
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