Sanctum: Developing the workflow
Encore spoke with the team from Digital Pictures, about their work on Sanctum.
How did you prepare for this project?
Rachel Knowles, head of post production: We met with Andrew Wight, line producer Brett Popplewell and post-production supervisor Marc Van Buuren back in early 2009. Our GM John Fleming had 3D on his radar for a long time and we were ready to make the investment; Sanctumwas the perfect opportunity. Andrew knew he’d be bringing a lot of expertise to the table from Avatar and his relationship with James Cameron; our guys learnt a lot but they also assisted in perfecting and adapting the technologies and workflows as well – we managed to set up a 3D editorial workflow which they hadn’t had back in the earlier days of Avatar.
Nic Smith, technical director: Coming into Sanctum we’d spent a lot of time in R&D looking at what other people in the industry were doing in terms of stereoscopy, what standards were in place, what technology was available and trying as much as possible to give ourselves a general education on the subject. We got an opportunity early on to start to field test our approach as a 3min 3D promo was needed for the Cannes Film Festival. This not only gave us a live, timepressured test but gave us Sanctummaterial that we could then start working with in terms of ironing out our processes before we went into the 3D DI. We’ve really had a double benefit from this project as we’ve been able to learn so much for ourselves about working in stereo and develop our own approach which differs quite a lot from what our research tells us other companies are doing but we also had experienced people like Andrew Wight and stereographer Chuck Comisky to draw from, which allowed us to accelerate the learning curve exponentially.
RK: Firstly we had to develop an approach to workflow, look at system, storage and viewing requirements and begin drawing up our pipeline. Secondly, we started to look at the colour element of the equation and how we wanted to approach translations between 3D and 2D deliverables.
What was it like, working with Cameron’s team?
RK: It was so high profile with his name attached we all just knew we had to step up (for Australia!) and pull it off.
NS: Early on in the shoot we had the opportunity to go up the Gold Coast and spend a couple of days in the “Pod” with Chuck Comisky getting a personal master class in stereoscopy and picking his brain to get as much information as possible about the approach to post they used on Avatar. Chuck is like the wise sage of stereoscopy; he sat there with his eyes fixed on the screens showing him the direct feeds from the camera’s and he would just throw comments out explaining what he was doing or begin to discuss a particular part of the 3D process. It really was invaluable, in all our testing time I was constantly referring back to the notes from those sessions with Chuck. During the whole process, especially the convergence passes we had Andrew Wight in the room, Andrew early on was really helpful I developing our “stereo eyes” and giving us pointers for the stereo rules that he, Jim and Chuck had developed working together.
RK: The best feeling was when the DP post-producer and I met Cameron after the cast and crew screening and he gave us his congratulations. He was genuinely impressed with what DP and iloura had achieved for the film.
What were the main issues with the workflow?
NS: We had twice as much data, two individual streams that need to be managed both together and discreetly in order to avoid any problems. We developed a naming system with the editorial team and a data management system in house that allowed us to constantly know which eye a shot came from. Part of our approach was also to run our own editorial department that chased production editorial, this allowed us to pick up sync and other stereo issues before cuts were submitted to DI and gave us the ability and time to completely and thoroughly check turnovers in stereo before updating the grading timeline (we ended up working through 10 or 11 versions of the cut in stereo). We utilised a live timeline transference between online, grading and mastering which is one of the major advantages of our configuration of Autodesk systems which meant we could pick up a graded timeline and add titles live in stereo. We also configured our theatre operations desk so we could switch in either a Lustre or a Smoke or both concurrently and have them viewable on the screen. All of this allowed us to be constantly, quickly and efficiently working in stereo and most importantly be instantly reviewing the results in the right environment.
What about the colour grading process?
NS: When colourist Brett Manson and I first began to research the colour process that had been used by other productions, we kept hearing that people were completing the film grade first, which made absolutely no sense to us. We could understand why people were working backwards on a stereo project so we developed a custom colour pipeline that allowed us live translations between the stereoscopic grade and the other deliverables. This was a key part of our testing process that allowed us a fluidity to turning round the other deliverables as soon as the films look was locked in stereo. Viewing standards to stereo are still very loose and under development so spent a long time testing the colour pipeline in order to make sure our approach would be transparent between different theatre display systems.
