Company Uses DaVinci Resolve to Color Correct Captain Phillips

Blackmagic Design today announced that Company 3 London has used DaVinci Resolve for color grading the film adaptation of Captain Phillips, the new blockbuster film starring Tom Hanks.

Four years after it made headlines, the harrowing true life story of American shipping captain Richard Phillips, swept up in a hostage ordeal after Somali pirates hijacked his ship, has been made into a new film by director Paul Greengrass, with Barry Akroyd as the cinematographer. Color correction for Captain Phillips was carried out by Company 3's senior colorist Rob Pizzey.

Barry has a naturalistic style of shooting, and Captain Phillips was no different, explained Pizzey. Everything is filmed handheld, so you never have any locked off shots during the film. Because of that, Barry is right on top of the action. You almost feel like a part of the film.

The challenge during this grade was the film's climax, which takes place at night. Most of the climax was actually shot during the day, so we had a big job on our hands matching those shots, which were filmed on a variety of formats, with the night footage.

A month before the DI, Akroyd and Pizzey had the chance to work on the conformed day for night' scenes, allowing them to start setting the look.

We worked through the scenes making sure that we could achieve what we wanted and flagged areas where we could do with some help from VFX. DaVinci Resolve's unlimited nodes and auto tracking capabilities were a big help during Captain Philips big day for night' scenes, said Pizzey.

The camera is always moving because you're at sea, so the tracking tool was perfect because I could hand draw shapes and then grade within that area. Resolve's auto tracking would then map to the movement of the camera, so we could get on with matching all of the footage. It was also really useful for lining up faces and pulling out eyes. With the auto tracking, you get the shape on there, and it maps it all the way through. It really did save me a lot of time.

Having got it in a pretty good place, we then rendered out the DPX files with the grade baked on and sent them over to the visual effects house, which was able to help us in areas where I'd darkened bits down to help sell the look.

When those shots came back into the timeline for the main DI, they were 90 percent final. The main DI was attended by Barry for the first seven days, during which time we set the look and mood and graded the climax of the film in full.

About DaVinci Resolve

Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve is the world's highest performance on set, editing and color correction solution for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux computers. DaVinci Resolve supports more real time color correction than any other system because it's not limited by the performance of the computer it's running on. DaVinci Resolve eliminates this performance barrier because it's based on a cluster of high performance GPU cards, so all processing is always real time. DaVinci Resolve has the power of a true real time performance solution so handles complex color grades even when using dozens of primaries, secondaries, Power Windows , multi point tracking, blurs, and more. DaVinci Resolve provides incredible performance in a low cost solution which can be easily upgraded by adding extra GPUs for supercomputer power to handle 4K resolutions, stereoscopic 3D and real time grading direct from raw camera files such as ARRI RAW, RED RAW and Sony RAW files which can be handled with ease.

About Blackmagic Design

Blackmagic Design creates the world's highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and film restoration software for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design's DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability, while the company's Emmy award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including stereoscopic 3D and 4K workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. For more information, please check http://www.blackmagicdesign.com.

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