Broadcast TECH
interior of the café. Similarly, there were several tunnel sequences with green-screen backgrounds that I could separate and deal with inde- pendently of the foreground shot.
Which camera gives a colourist the best images to work with? The 35mm film camera. If you want the best, a 35mm scanned negative is still the ideal. Obviously that’s not always practical or even appropriate for every project. Birdsong was one of the first major TV dramas shot on Arri’s Alexa (below right), and I have to say, it is really good. Not perfect, but it has its own quality.
What reference monitor did you use? We had been using Sony CRTs for the past seven years and every year we looked at ‘the new CRT’ but nothing measured up to what we had. Then we looked at the Sony 25-inch PVM 2541 OLED professional moni- tors and they are fantastic, so we now have three of them. We started grading Birdsong using the old CRT, and the new OLEDs arrived mid- way through so I put one on top of the other to see the difference. The OLED is truly a quantum leap in quality; I could see a lot of detail in the blacks that wasn’t visible on the CRT and it was very sharp.
Sherlock: focus was kept on the cast by boosting colours
SHERLOCK Colourist Kevin Horsewood Post house Prime Focus Grading system Filmlight’s Baselight
What was your brief? Director Paul McGuigan wanted a particular style with a green hue across the episodes in the first series. But when we started talking about the second series he wanted to do something different, and all three episodes were quite dissimilar. For The Hounds Of Baskerville he wanted a pinky look to the exteriors so that it didn’t look like an episode of Agatha Christie in the countryside. It was a hint of something rather than an obvious wash, so that it didn’t look quite right.
How did you achieve it? The ideal situation is to get involved in the production as early as pos- sible. For Sherlock, we did camera tests with the Alexa, 5D and some Phantom shots. It’s important that the workflow keeps the maximum image going into the grade. To get the best image quality, sometimes you have to use different pathways for different cameras. With the pink and
rose feel of The Hounds
‘The first series of Sherlock had green hues – for this one we wanted something
different Kevin Horsewood
Of Baskerville in mind, I kept skin tones normal, using shapes to isolate the foreground figures and make sure the images had a rich yet moody feel. I used Baselight’s layer tools and defocus vignettes to pick out the important elements of each shot to add shape and definition to the final image. I kept the focus on the cast by masking them out from the back- grounds and giving them a shot of colour to boost their on-screen pres- ence and soften their skin tones to give the pictures a bit of a sheen.
Why do you use Baselight? I used Nucoda for three years before I joined Prime Focus [from Pepper Post]. It didn’t take long to get used to Baselight, but I would say it will take a year to get to the same speed [as with the Nucoda]. Baselight has some better features, but in Nucoda some things are easier and quicker; overall, I would say they are on par. Baselight has multi-paste, which saves a lot of time. However, I really like noise reducer in Nucoda. One feature I’d like to see added to Baselight, which is being worked on, is rendering as you work on something, because it’s frustrating that once you’ve graded you have to render before you can lay the pro- gramme off.
Which camera gives a colourist the best images to work with? The three episodes were shot on Alexa, Phantom and Canon 5D cam- eras and I would say the Alexa was very clean; it didn’t warrant much noise reduction.
What reference monitor did you use? We used Dolby’s PRM4200 refer- ence monitors. It was the first time, and I can now see and dig into detail something I wouldn’t touch ordinar- ily. They seem to be the answer to the question of what replaces CRTs, but it did take a couple of days to line it up. [Dolby] put scopes on it and suggested how it should look, but in the end we put one monitor next to it and adjusted it by eye.
www.broadcastnow.co.uk/technology January/February 2012 | Broadcast TECH | 23
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52