Creative Post breaks the Ice with Mistika in the spectacular Wonders of the Arctic D

Supervising Editor Adrian Saywell at Torontos Creative Post Inc. discusses the challenges of grading the recent IMAX documentary Wonders of the Arctic 3D, and the reasons behind selecting Mistika for online, colour correction and titling.

All images are Copyright and Courtesy of Science North (via Creative Post)

The $4 million visually stunning Wonders of the Arctic 3D natural world epic marks Science Norths fifth IMAX production in conjunction with Lickley and Giant Screen Films based in Chicago and has been distributed in more than 100 theatres around the world. The flawless 42-minute film focuses on the effects of climate change to the Arctic environment and the impact on humans and animals, such as the resilient Inuit peoples and Polar bears that reside there.

Copyright and Courtesy of Science North (via Creative Post)

The film depicts how it is the toughest place to live on earth and how creatures that live there thrive despite the harshest elements. Historically, more than half of the Arctic Ocean was covered by ice all year round but in the past 50 years, ice cover has been reduced by 70 per cent, and is predicted that within 15 years, there could be a completely ice-free Arctic during some months of the year, according to Lickley. The film provides a voyage to a world many would never visit themselves and plays a key role in educating and informing audiences about this incredibly important topic.

Creative Post started work on the film back in 2010 when primary camera shooting started. Part of what made it possible to achieve such stunning results is the companys pipeline. Adrian outlines the steps involved, The first duties included onset processing and backup of Phantom footage. Once backed up and shipped to Creative Post, the processing of dailies for all digital formats in both Phantom and Red was completed using Mistika. This enabled us to create HD ProRes files with matching names and T/C's for offline. He remarks, Before we purchased Mistika, the Phantoms T/C would not match the QT created by other programs.

Copyright and Courtesy of Science North (via Creative Post)

Adrian goes on further to explain the online process in more detail, Footage was supplied by DKP and Science North at various resolutions ranging from 4K to 8K in both 2D and 3D. Utilizing the open platform that is Mistika, we were able to scale all the various formats to the end result 5616X4096, which was then filmed out to 70MM for IMAX Projection. As it is near impossible to work in 3D at the full 5.6K resolution, the proxy and render options in the Mistika enabled us to scale to 2K in 3D, where all work was completed before applying the corrections back to the raw camera material. This made it fast and easy to work in such a large format. Full online finishing, stereoscopic 3D alignments, colour correction and titling were performed in Mistika as well as final versioning in 5.6K 3D, 4K Scope 3D and 2K Scope 3D. New tools in version 7.2 enabled us to apply display filters such as log to linear LUTs as well as cropping of 1.85 and 1.79 images into the 70MM format without actually applying any FX to the environment.

Creative Posts owner and CEO, Ken MacNeil remarked that before they had a Mistika on board, they would not have been able to work on a film of this scope, within the given deadlines. Purchased in 2011, Mistika was chosen for its multi-resolution capability and advanced 3D tools that are required for the 4K+ resolution that Creative Post generally master in. Online Editor Adrian Saywell was also able to use Mistika's powerful tools to stabilise and fix 3D shots, which included colour matching, and alignment, that he said, without Mistika, would have been deemed unusable.

Senior colourist Jim Fleming was also able to use the powerful colour grading tools to pull the best images out of the footage. The 3D colour grading session was technically straightforward because the left and right images were already exactly colour-matched in the pre-grade processing. This allowed for a film that was breathtaking in its amazing images but also for 3D that was easy to watch, allowing for a more realistic viewing experience.

Other high profile programmes Creative Post have recently worked on include Ice Road Truckers, Bollywood Star, High-Tech Red Necks, Ice Sweat and Tears and many others.

Wonders of the Arctic - Trailer from Giant Screen Films on Vimeo.

View the Wonders of the Arctic 3D film trailer here http://vimeo.com/86907815

Courtesy of Science North (via Creative Post).

Cameras used in filming Wonders of the Arctic 3D:

IMAX Dual Phantom 4K

Red Epic 5K

35MM 8 perf vista vision 3D IMAX Camera (scanned to 6K)

65MM Aerial IMAX MSM Camera (scanned to 8K)

ABOUT CREATIVE POST INC. & CAPSULE MEDIA

510 Front St, West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5V 1B8

http://www.creativepostinc.com

http://www.capsulemedia.ca

ABOUT SGO - Visit them at http://www.sgo.es

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