Last month we had the opportunity to work with the folks at both Snowboarder and Transworld Snowboarding on their respective full length snowboarding films. We have been working with these guys coloring, mixing and finishing their movies for the last few years, so this year we knew what to expect and had a plan in place for a quick turn and burn workflow.
First up was director John Cavan’s “Resolution”. He arrived on Monday afternoon with a not quite locked fifty six minute edit that he thought should ship end of day Thursday. With some wrangling we pushed the ship time to EOD Friday. While I would lead the color and finish, I had Nick Sanders, and Waqaz Qazi helping grading and DJ Bobby B ready for a quick mix.
John had his project on a local RAID drive. My plan was to export a text and graphics free version of the edit onto our central storage to color in DaVinci Resolve using the scene cut detect feature. Then we created a text and graphics only version of the edit in Premier Pro and media managed that on to our system. After “baking and blading" the entire film we divided the work between the guys and got busy.
With such a short turnaround, there is not much time to create “looks”. John’s biggest concern was not to loose detail in the snow and that it look natural without strong color casts. The principal photographer on this film shot with a Red Epic. The footage had beed rendered to ProRes with the camera look in place. He did a great job so it was easy work balancing out those shots. It gets tougher with some of the skater style sections of the film when they combine old HVX200’s with cheap fisheye lenses and S-LOG footage and GoPro all in the same scene.
By Friday mid morning we had the film graded and mixed. we only need to assemble and QC. The one wrinkle: several riders from the film and one of the sponsors was coming at 2:30 to watch it. We got it put together and pressed play on time, but without having a QC session. Of course it was all good and we made our Friday delivery.
Two weeks later director Theo Muse arrived in my bay early on Monday with his Transworld Snowboarding film “Insight” ready to go. Having just finished one of these things, our crew was ready for action. We used the same approach for Theo’s film as we had on “Resolution”. Theo is one hard working guy. He spent the next three nights camped on the sofa in Online 2, sorting out the final details. He had been releasing teaser segments of the film for the last few months and had established a look for the film based on what we had done on his prior film “Origins”. I used that as a starting point, and with Qazi’s and Bobby’s help, we got the film graded, mixed and reassembled in time for a Friday PM upload.
One of things we ran into was that both John and Theo were using the latest version of Premier Pro. Because our facility has a enterprise level license we had no way of upgrading without causing headaches for IT and ourselves. To work around this we simply used the XML export feature. This has worked really well for us and I find it is the best way to translate an edit to Resolve, After Effects as well as going backwards in Premier Pro versions.
Both of these films are available on iTunes. Go buy them today!