The movie version of The Hobbithas attracted a lot of attention, not least because it’s the first major film to be released with 48fps rather than the usual 24. Dick Hobbstalked to the team at Park Road Post Production in Wellington, and to their key technology supplier SGO
(L-R) Martin Freeman and director Peter
Jackson on the set of the fantasy adventure The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, a
production of New Line Cinema and Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures (MGM), released by Warner Bros. Pictures and MGM
Sometimes as much as 12TB a day. “When we knew that The
PARK ROAD has had a long association with director Peter Jackson, and together they had developed smooth workflows for handling stereo 3D. So even when the additional technical challenges of high frame rate were thrown into the mix, the team was confident the technical ducks were lining up and they could handle it. The advantage of HFR is the
freedom to move the camera quickly when needed, like in the big battle sequences, where the camera dives and swoops to track the action without judder. Some purists complained about the HFR effect as not being ‘film-like’, but in a sense that was the point. The new technology should not be ignored just because it is different. Twice as many frames means twice as much data. Double that again because of course the film is shot in stereoscopic 3D. Storage is a problem, but
Hobbit was coming along, and Peter was on board, we had a busy NAB,” recalled Phil Oatley, Park Road’s head of technology. This was April 2010. “We were doing some aggressive testing with all the usual post suspects,” he says. “Then, on the last day, we saw the most compelling demonstration we had ever had from a manufacturer.” The demonstration was with Spanish company SGO. Its Mistika finishing system was already established as the best tool for stereo 3D and it was this that attracted the Park Road team to look at it. But Oatley adds: “We were utterly astounded by the rate at which SGO develops their platform”. A week of testing in Wellington with SGO and Park Road established the workflow, which begins on set with some heavy- duty data wrangling. Park Road built trolleys they called ‘barbecues’, containing three Mac Pros, 64TB of storage, high end networking, and an LTO drive. The data team ran a QC pass on the data in realtime during ingest. The networking meant that barbecues on set in the studio connected directly to the Park Road servers. On location the fibre was replaced by duplicate LTO-5 tapes hand carried by trusted production runners. Once in Park Road virtually
every creative task was handled by SGO Mistika software. The typical Mistika configuration is an HP Z820 computer with an NVidia Quadro GPU. For The Hobbit, SGO worked with DVS on a 48fps video I/O board. The first task was to derive an editorial version. This pass applied corrections to the 3D geometry where required, and a colour grade, to create an offline copy from the raw 5K data, as an Avid MXF. In general the editorial
(L-R) Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins and Ian McKellen as Gandalf in the fantasy adventure The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, a production of New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures (MGM), released by Warner Bros. Pictures and MGM
throughput is a bigger one. At the time, there was no way of moving two streams of 48fps in realtime, let alone display them.
A second challenge was that Jackson was keen to retain all
of the dynamic resolution produced by the Red Epic cameras so he wanted to keep the 16 bit raw data, giving the equivalent of 13.5 stops all the way in to the final grade. So the data architects had to find
a way to capture, deliver to post, edit, grade and composite the 5K resolution, 16 bit per colour output, 48fps output of the Red camera. Two cameras per rig. As many as 16 rigs on a big battle sequence.
version was just the dominant eye in 2D, but where 3D was required it was delivered in side-by-side format to make it completely transparent to HD infrastructure. This allowed the offline editors to work on standard Avids using HD televisions as monitors, even if they needed to see 3D. The workflow also produced single eye MXF and MOV files