The post house has adopted the grading system as its “hero system” for colour, conform and finishing services
The Look has made a major investment in Blackmagic Design, adopting Davinci Resolve Studio as its “hero system” for colour, conform and finishing services.
The post house, which is based in London and Cardiff, provides conform, grade, online and playout to clients such as Netflix, Apple, Sky and Amazon Studios. It has long-standing relationships with the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV Studios.
The company has a mixed estate of grading systems, including Resolve, Grass Valley Rio and Autodesk Flame.
Mark Maltby, CTO and director of online, explains: “We had a couple of Resolve workstations for remote grading. But there have been developments for the Blackmagic system, such as its tracking and collaboration capabilities, that we felt we were missing out on by not fully moving over to it.
“Whereas before you might have to track a handful of scenes in a whole series, now every time a particular actor appears on screen, they’ll want to track their face and do some form of work. We’re forever putting shapes around things and highlighting them. That tracking work can even be shared across the colour assistants in collaboration mode to improve the experience for our clients.”
Another advantage is The Look can use Mac and PC workstations to run DaVinci Resolve, whereas specialist hardware was required for the other systems.
The Look has invested in 12 Resolve systems, six of which run on physical HP Z8 workstations at the facility, while the others operate under an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud model.
Maltby says: “When we need to add more seats, we can either put in more IaaS workstations or buy a new off-the-shelf HP workstation with a DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G card and just connect to the network.”
The company has four Resolve Advanced Panels to control the grading software, and a number of smaller panels for the technical operator’s room. These were supplied by Adam Welsh at Big Pic Media.
As part of the upgrade, The Look has created a new cinema suite on the fifth floor of its building with a Resolve Advanced Panel. It has also added a new desk in the main suite with another Advanced Panel.
CMatby said: “Resolve can handle a lot of the TV online, and denoise can go to the colour team now, but anything more advanced [for online] can be easily sent to our Flame team.”
The Look has two jobs for Sky going through the new systems, as well as a project for BBC Three and a feature for Studio Canal that’s already completed and delivered.
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