American Cinematographer - August 2012 - 50

•|• Supporting Stereo Capture •|•
◗Web-Slinging in Stereo
with the cameras at all times, and I also
did on-set color correction for dailies
and editorial,” Willard explains. “Steve
and Zachary handled data. After
reloading, I would take the left- and
right-eye RedMag SSDs to my color
cart, where I was able to read the files
with my Apple Mac Pro tower
[running two Red Rocket cards to
enable real-time rendering and viewing
of the footage on a 24" monitor] and
color correct them.
“I used Redcine-X software to
Schwartzman checks the frame while working with 3ality Technica’s TS-5 stereo rig.
T
he Amazing Spider-Man marks the
Hollywood debut of 3ality
Technica’s TS-5 stereo camera rigs,
but the technology was familiar to
Sony, parent company of Columbia
Studios, because the rigs had been
used for training at the Sony 3-D
Technology Center and were already
on the radar of colleagues who had the
ear of John Schwartzman, ASC.
Among those colleagues was Andrew
Lesnie, ASC, ACS, who was planning
to use the rigs for The Hobbit. Lesnie
advised Schwartzman that if he
wanted to reduce rig size and weight,
the TS-5 — engineered to accommodate
smaller digital cameras and
featuring miniaturized and lighter
beam-splitter technology — might be
a good fit.
In fact, 3ality did not have to
do much of a selling job on
Schwartzman, according to company
CEO Steve Schklair, an ASC associate
member. “Spider-Man was originally
scheduled as a 2-D shoot, and
when that changed, they were not
about to change their shooting schedule,”
says Schklair. “That meant they
needed a smaller, less bulky 3-D
camera system. On-board recording
with the Epic made it tetherless, and
that opened up the ability to use the
50
August 2012
rigs on Steadicam, cranes and cable
rigs without customizing a lot of
gear.”
Schwartzman adds that the
TS-5 “is an evolutionary step because
it’s computerized to monitor the rig
100 times a second. Our experience
with 3-D rigs that had to be aligned
by hand was that it took too much
time and was not accurate.
Remember, we had to give Sony
Pictures Imageworks the best possible
3-D as early as we could to fit into
the visual-effects pipeline.
“My concern was the on-set
speed,” he continues, “and 3ality blew
everyone else away and delivered to
Imageworks a better 3-D image with
a ton of metadata out of the stereo
imaging processing computer. That
allowed those shots to move quicker
through the system.”
The TS-5 rig has since been
used on The Great Gatsby and Jack the
Giant Killer.
— Michael Goldman
color-correct the dominant eye
creatively, as per John Schwartzman,”
Willard continues. “Then, I would sync
the left and right eyes to make a 3-D
clip, and color-correct the non-dominant
eye until there was no discernible
color difference between the two. Then,
I’d hand the mags to Steve and Zach,
who used Light Iron carts on set to
ingest all the footage onto Maxx Digital
[Evo 6G SAS 48TB] RAIDs. From
there, we generated all dailies and editorial
files and sent drives to Sony
Colorworks so we’d have a backup in
another physical location. Additionally,
Steve and Zach would copy all original
raw data to LTO-5 tape.”
Chen notes that the workflow
did require “new players on set” who
collaborated closely with the camera
team. “The Red people, the 3ality
people, data-wrangling people and the
wireless-communication people —
suddenly, there were five teams around
the camera!
That illustrates the
complexity of shooting in stereoscopic
digital.”
The workflow also illustrates how
the fine line between production and
post is growing ever finer. “The lab has
moved from post to the set,” says
Willard. “Everyone is now backing up
footage on set, and most cinematographers
now do some form of color
correction on set. We used no post
houses to color correct or generate
dailies on Spider-Man. We kept that all
within the camera department. It keeps
total control of the image in the cinematographer’s
hands.”
Schwartzman emphasizes that
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