American Cinematographer - December 2010 - 88

Post Focus

On Fright Night, cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, AEC (background) collaborated on set with Company 3 colorist Alex Bickel (foreground) to color-correct the 3-D footage shot with Red One cameras.

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Company 3 Brings 3-D Post to Set By Simon Wakelin

Company 3, a member of Ascent Media’s creative services group, recently found itself reinventing its dailies pipeline to accommodate three very different 3-D productions, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides , Fright Night and Transformers: The Dark of the Moon. On all three, the filmmakers used the company’s services on-set to gauge how their final 3-D images would appear. Jackie Lee, vice president of feature sales at Ascent Media, notes, “We’re now seeing post workflows being integrated directly on set. The expectation is to have final sequences ready for delivery as quickly as possible.” For example, on the visual-effects-heavy fourth Pirates film, “the visual-effects team needed to see sequences as soon as possible, and in context, so they could begin their work immediately,” says Dylan Carter, Company 3’s director of visual workflow. To help streamline the transition from set to post, Pirates’ camera crew included a stereographer who adjusted convergence, or the focal point in relation to the screen plane, either toward or away from the audience to minimize eye strain across edits and guide the eye to specific parts of the frame. “Each shot has a certain amount of depth, and the position of the characters and props also need to roll
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comfortably from cut to cut,” says Carter. “The size of the screen is an important factor in setting the correct convergence. Since the Pirates stereographer was watching 3-D dailies projected at 2K, he could continually calibrate and refine the look on set the next day.” Plasma screens were also used on the Pirates set to give the team an idea of how depth effects will play on smaller screens when the film is eventually released on home video. “Moving from an image 50 feet across to inches across can require some tweaking,” observes Anthony Davis, Ascent Media’s director of on-location services. Throughout the Pirates, Fright N ight and Transformers shoots, Company 3 was delivering “both flat and 3-D dailies to the editing houses so they could cut in 2-D and review in 3-D,” says Carter. “Most of the time, they’re not editing while wearing 3-D glasses; they’re cutting 2-D, and then checking to make sure it works in 3-D.” Fright Night on-set colorist Alex Bickel elaborates, “They’re editing with a single stream of Avid 125 DNX 1080 media that has left and right eye, side by side. They typically scale the image to look at only the left eye while cutting, but remove the scale and screen it almost exclusively in 3-D.” The Transformers film mixed 35mm with digital capture (courtesy of the Sony F35 and Arri Alexa), but both the Pirates film and Fright Night were shot digitally with Red One cameras. Through

American Cinematographer

Photo courtesy of Company 3.
American Cinematographer - December 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 2010
