Quantum Break, Keeping in time with Mistika: A chat with colourist Juan Cabrera

The action-adventure video game market as we knew it changed forever when the sci-fi game Quantum Break was released worldwide in April this year. Developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Microsoft Studios, Quantum Break is a unique blend of traditional third person interactive gameplay and an integrated live-action television show featuring the actual actors of the characters thats outcome is affected by the player's choices throughout the game.

Available for Xbox One and Microsoft Windows users, the story follows a protagonist Jack Joyce attempting to save the world with his time manipulation powers. Due to the multiple outcomes of the game over a series of events and time scales, extensive post production work had to take place in order to retain consistency with the story throughout the television show. Juan Cabrera is the first, as well as most experienced SGO Mistika operator living in the U.S. and one of the top in the world, who previously worked as a colourist and Stereo 3D Supervisor at the prestigious J.J. Abrams' production company, Bad Robot and now owns his own studio, LightBender. Juan talks us through how he used SGO's Mistika to overcome any challenges that Quantum Break's unique format of television brought to the show's post production process.

For over a decade I've used SGO's Mistika to work on both 2D and 3D blockbusters across broadcast and cinema including high end cinema titles such as Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Star Trek into Darkness, Beneath, The Amazing Spider-Man and Prometheus as well as TV shows such as Chosen and the upcoming StartUp.

Working on Quantum Break appealed to me straight away. I have three Mistika toolkits at my own studio LightBender and I use them for a variety of projects, but this was the first time I've worked on such a unique gaming project and it was so different to other projects. They started shooting in February last year (2015) and it took approximately eight months to deliver the final cut, using Mistika to review VFX and serve as a hub for conforming and versioning.

Quantum Break was interesting because it's still a product that needs colour grading but built into the whole concept of a video game. This means there isn't one set story line, the actual story changes multiple times when you start playing the game so it was imperative I came up with a workflow that we could work effectively across all the different scenarios.

I worked as the VFX Supervisor and colourist on the project alongside a team of over 40 people in three different countries. Although I've worked on a wide variety of projects, I've never worked on something that relies on the gameplay of the user so heavily in an active timeline of events and it's the first thing that's ever been done on this scale. It required a great deal of VFX and very complex visuals.

One of the things I like to get involved in as a colourist is the look and feel if the protagonists peripheral action as you can start defining colour palettes right from the beginning. All together it took a lot of time to sort this peripheral action, design interfaces, concepts and VFX. I spent a good amount of time on each episode for colour, which the preview VFX helped with. Specifically, within Quantum Break, one of my favourite features of VFX is that the protagonist character is able to freeze scenes. There's time stutters' where everything stops and the player can move around a world that is totally frozen. To make this more realistic and organic, these scenes were shot on a handheld camera instead of motion control which produced a shocking' and off balance' look to it.

A unique VFX challenge was attempting to match some of the visuals from the game into the TV series. However, Mistika allowed me to centralise each segment for review and I was able to go back and forth so I could have multiple changes and versions all at once on the timeline.

One of the biggest tests that we found exclusive to this project was looking at the previews for the multiple timelines, as this meant going back and forth through different timelines continually due to the multiple outcomes. Using Mistika helped re-conform really quickly as you can go through chunks of the four episodes with all options open, cutting them all in together at the end. Mistika allows for a full timeline with the main narrative displayed alongside all the different variations, making it easy to render all together.

Also, the Mistika allowed us to start grading the files before we actually had the final cut locked in place which allowed us not only to get a feeling of the scenes, but we could trace each episode back to before we had the final episode. This made the re-conform process really easy. Previously every change would take a lot of time and money, but with Mistika you're not afraid of making these changes.

In addition, the whole show was shot on ALexa XT, using the latest firmware in ProRes 444 XQ files, however the Mistika did not support this file type at the time. However, I sent a couple of the file types over to the SGO team in Spain and within a couple of weeks we were able to collaborate and they developed the support for the files in under a week. 16bit TIFF files were then created for the VFX from the original ProRes444XQ files.

Alongside its speed, I use Mistika as its gives me the most creativity. Mistika works with all the tools in customisable ways for a fully artistic purpose. The thing I like about the Mistika which made me invest in one in the first place and makes me go back time and time again is the fact that it's versatile. It doesn't matter how crazy the project is and what dynamic range of tools are required, such as within the Quantum Break project, Mistika always

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