House of Cards finishing touches done with FilmLight?s Baselight

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House of Cards finishing touches done with FilmLight s Baselight --

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 11:31

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House of Cards, a US political drama which features on Netflix, released its second season to subscribers in 4k Ultra HD. Laura Jans-Fazio, Lead Colourist at Deluxe Entertainment Services Encore, the company handling the show s post production, used a Baselight TWO system and Blackboard control surface to grade the uncompressed 4k footage.

Working directly with Jans-Fazio on the grade was Co-Producer Peter Mavromates and Post Supervisor Hameed Shaukat.

A product of FilmLight, a company which develops colour grading systems, image processing applications and workflow tools, Blackboard is a control surface product which provides functions to simplify the creation of complex grades and effects. FilmLight s Baselight range is designed to deliver the necessary power needed for intensive grading, with Baselight TWO specified to cope with high definition video, 2K commercials and longform work.

Using Baselight, Jans-Fazio was able to achieve sophisticated colour and composite control in real time, allowing clients to view results immediately. The floating-point processing function allowed her to expand her creativity - for example, windows which appeared blown out, could be graded to show detail then composited into the rest of the scene.

Baselight has so many features and the fact that it works in floating-point processing gives me image quality for a pristine picture every time. We often used multiple shapes in a single shot, and being able to do that in one layer in Baselight was a real time-saver. We could also composite through VFX mattes, and do monitor replacements, in real time, said Jans-Fazio.

The grade aligns with Director David Fincher s vision for the show which included steering away from over-saturated colours and maintaining the palette throughout to highlight the story s tense, internal political intrigues.

Fincher and DOP Igor Martinovic were able to provide Jans-Fazio with feedback using a digital collaboration tool by PIX, a company which provides collaboration and project management systems for professionals in the entertainment industry.

Morgan Strauss, Senior Vice President of Encore Operations, commented, As episodes were completed, they were uploaded to PIX, which allowed the producer, director and DP to view content on calibrated Sony OLED monitors. They returned their feedback, which we could extract directly into Baselight, and Jans-Fazio finalised the look and delivered the files to Netflix. It was essential to maximise this asynchronous collaborative process and, along with Baselight s sophisticated toolset, it meant we could fully realise the creative needs of the producers and DP.

Wolfgang Lempp, Co-Founder of FilmLight, concluded, Television episodics are always a real challenge for grading, because you have very little time to finesse the grade despite the length of the material. The challenges were compounded on House of Cards because of the need to work at 4k uncompressed. We built huge processing power into Baselight just to meet this sort of everyday challenge so customers like Laura Jans-Fazio and the production and post- production team at Encore are not wasting time.

Visit the FilmLight and PIX websites for more information.

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