TELEVISION | CONTENT CREATION
TELEVISION
Patrick Woodard is colourist at Hollywood production, post, and consulting company DigitalFilm Tree, and recently completed the grade on NBC’s NCIS: Los Angeles. His tool of choice is Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Software. The show is shot on location at many locales throughout LA, so the look of the series changes from episode to episode, making regular communication with NCIS: Los Angeles director of photography Victor Hammer essential for Woodard. “The DoP and John Mills, his
DIT, created a LUT on set, which we used for the dailies. It also became a guide to how to shoot a scene,” says Woodard. “I could tell what it would look like if they go warm, if they go cool, if they go saturated.” During post production on the Resolve, Woodard was able to pull up the edit to see what the DoP’s intention was for a particular scene, which provided essential guidance when it came to getting started on grading the raw files. Woodard calls the show’s post
production workflow ‘streamlined’ as DigitalFilm Tree’s Resolve runs on the same operating system as the online edit, which is done on
Final Cut Pro Studio. “I have instant access to all the files I need, and so does the guy in the next room doing visual effects, who is likely working on the same scene I am,” he says. “It allows us to be really flexible – with the time crunch we have on episodic television, we all have to be working at the same time,” adds Woodard. “It’s very efficient this way, and the performance I get off the Mac Pro is amazing compared to what I was working on even a year ago. Being able to have everything at real-time, being able to stack as many nodes I need is important, and the system has a great 3D tracker, which allows me to do a lot of detailed work.” Later in the process, “The DoP comes in to review and we make refinements together, and there is no downtime for me. It’s great because it means I can spend more time on a scene or a shot, whereas before it was more prepping or rendering. Now once I bring in a file I am ready to go,” he says. Next season things will become even more streamlined thanks to the upcoming release of Resolve 8. Currently, NCIS: Los Angeles shoots on many different cameras — including
the Arri Alexa, Canon 5D, Sony F900, JVC GY100 and Sony Go!Cams. Dealing with all these different formats creates an extra step in post for DigitalFilm Tree, which presently processes all the formats internally. “We get all the various format
files from set and uniform those for an offline file that we give Final Cut Pro Studio editors as dailies. Their offline editing codec is ProRes LT,” reports Woodard. “Broadcast show deadlines do not wait for color systems without real-time performance, and that is one of the biggest advantages of the Resolve. The real-time performance capabilities are awesome.”
Key advantages
The speed and efficiency of Resolve’s 3D tracker streamlines production time
Resolve is Mac-based, making it well suited to a Final Cut Pro Studio workflow
Its node-based grading enables a more flexible approach to colour grading
In Resolve, Woodard can pull up the edit to see what the DoP’s intention was for a particular scene, giving him guidance
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