Digital Sputnik: The “New” Post-Production

INTRODUCTION
by Dankmar García

I had the opportunity to work with Kaspar Kallas on Argentina last year, during the shooting of the movie “El Premio” (The Prize) by Paula Markovitch. Kaspar is the founder of a very small post-house on Estonia. And by the time we were working on “El Premio” he was finishing the post-production of Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”. Both movies participated on this year’s Berlinale.

Kaspar and his brother Kaur, founded the company 3 years ago. With only 3 employees, they are focused all their efforts on developing new tools and workflows to aid the postproduction so it can be more creative and less technical. With more than 10 years of experience and knowledge applied that go from edition to VFX artistry, they have created a reliable company that is getting closer to what seems to be the future of movie making.

This “New” post, as Kaspar calls it, has a simple premise: a “One man’s” support to the DoP from pre production to the final screening. This would be the only responsible for every step and every decision made on the way, from the picture being recorded to the final output. “Responsibility in this case means if I make a mistake, I have the means to fix this situation down the line in production pipeline. So the Producer, Director and DoP have only one person to deal with: Me. No meetings. No blame game.” says Kaspar.

The “New” Post
by Kaspar Kallas

There is actually nothing new about having a small and effective team for filmmaking. Then again it has always been a compromise of tools and possibilities. It has more to-do with quality and technology access, rather than innovation.

Technology keeps marching on and there is nothing new about that either. The only thing that keeps chaining is the time window of professional to prosumer. The tools that are bleeding edge in a moment are already in prosumer access within months of initial release in the highest end software/hardware. Then again there are some tools that are never available for highness systems.

Access to tools does not separate professionals anymore. Once again the industry is calling out for Hero's, artist who are capable moving fast and efficiently in post-production pipeline (Hero suite, used to be very expensive hardware and software combination used for film and television finishing by a Hero who is very capable in editing, coloring and mastering). Only this time the lines between production phases are even more blurred. The artist will have to leave the comfortable settings of a studio and take part of pre-production and production itself.

Throughout filmmaking there have been different technicians on set to assist DoP. But it has never been unthinkable that DoP cannot take care of all the responsibilities on his own. For a short period of time it was color technician who was the exception to prove the rule. Now with the advent of digital film cameras and stereography once again technician have temporarily forced their way into mandatory part of the camera team.

There is a very principle reason why the technicians job fades away in time. DoP responsibility is to create the most memorable images anyone can imagine. Technicians job on the other hand is to make sure that the images do not stand out in any way. So for the sake of creative freedom DoP needs an artist as assistant rather than technician to tell what is not technically correct.

The tools

Most prosumer tools today are very capable of producing content for the highest cinematic standards. Then again I have not found one tool that would suite all the needs for post production, even the highest end tools need assistance. So we developed our own in-house software that would "glue" together all the different pieces.

Iridas Speedgrade and Metarender: very intuitive and easy to use grading software with support next to none. There is no special hardware requirements for full technical support. Command-line rendering is very important for integrating to in-house software. As an extra perk, one can easily drive cinema projector over SDI for final work in any Digital Cinema theater. Most importantly it will work with most of the media I get directly without any conversion or import procedure.

Iridas tools are central for our workflow, because it will be the first thing to decode any incoming material, prepare dpx files for compositing and effects and also the final step to finish grading, before rendering out J2C files for digital cinema masters.

I use one computer to run all processes parallel so I could make good use of multi CPU environment. So while 1 pass of metarender is preparing flat grade DPX files for compositing I am grading another part of the film. When DPX files are ready I will to the preparation for camera tracking, for computing time again I can grade next available shot. When processing finishes I will do the composite. All in supervised session.

The glue

The in-house software we use is built on similar notion of Batch in Autodesk products. The software keeps track where the sources are coming from and what procedures have been used on them, so if any compositing, grading, etc. changes are implemented, it will mark the downstream procedures for re-rendering and generates a script for rendering. As all the plugins for different parts are just scripts, it is quite simple and straight forward.

Extra to Iridas tools we use Cineform, FCP, Premiere Pro, Nuke, EasyDCP and Photoshop.

No compromise in quality

Thanks to these tools it is possible for one man to do the extremely technical finishing jobs in unprecedented quality and time frame. The other perk in working with DoP from very early on in the production I know from the first steps on where the film is going aesthetically, so even when picking a camera and lighting equipment DoP can make well informed choice.

When I am on set as second AC, DIT, Stereograopher (or all of the above), I can help to make sure that every step is in the right direction for the end goal. The final finishing becomes just executing the final details rather than trying to bang the footage into something it was never shot for.