Picture Shop used an ACES pipeline for the conform, pre-grade online, grade and online
Wild Babies follows the lives of 17 wild baby animals in 16 countries. Narrated and directed by Helena Bonham Carter, the series takes its viewers from South Africa to South Carolina. Humble Bee Films produced the series with the online and conform completed by Picture Shop, Streamland Media’s picture division.
Imran Ramzan, technical manager at Picture Shop, said: “Even before the pandemic, filming 17 different kinds of baby animals would have required several different cameras. However, shooting during the pandemic compounded this. Navigating changing travel regulations and flight delays meant production often had to rely on the people and technology available in the region. As a result, nearly 20 different camera formats, including GoPros and drones were used.”
There was an enormous amount of data to process at the end of the shoot. The 8 x 30-minute series saw half a petabyte of data stored in total, a ratio of around 400:1 in terms of actual media used.
“It’s very common in wildlife filmmaking to have vast amounts of data,” says Ramzan. “We advised the Humble Bee team to hire a large network attached storage box that we could then simply transport to our offices and plug in directly, which worked extremely well.
“We used an ACES pipeline for the conform, pre-grade online, grade and online, which works extremely well for a natural history programme such as this, and absolutely helped to give us the best possible colour accuracy through the whole process, not to mention Resolve’s ability to create custom LUTs easily. We used Avid for the offline and DaVinci Resolve for the conform, and the integration between the two was brilliant, especially given that every camera under the sun had been used to shoot the film. For example, the ease and flexibility of the frame rate conversion in Resolve saved a lot of time, including how effects like 3D warps and ramp speeds are preserved between the two packages.”
After conforming each episode, the team transferred it to solid-state storage to support the pre-grade online process onwards. James Beynon, online editor completed the online using camera originals rather than creating a mix-down, allowing him to ensure a high-quality build for stabilisations, noise reductions and quality control. Before the grade, he applied IDTs and LUTs to the footage where appropriate.
After the grading, he worked to apply noise reduction and sharpening. Using an ACES colour profile in Resolve meant he was able to transfer the content to and from Nucoda easily. At this stage, he also added title graphics and delivery standards.
The Picture Shop online and conform team in the UK made use of Fusion for finishing and adding graphics, as well as several third-party plugins for Fusion such as Mocha and Sapphire, which added final touches to the series.
Throughout this process, having access to the original native files accelerated the workflow significantly; the team could simply take them from their storage rather than asking another organisation for files.
“I actually got into this industry to work on natural history productions,” says Ramzan. “Wild Babies really captures the rollercoaster of emotions of family life in the wild, and it’s fantastic to see Netflix pushing different formats. I ended up watching three episodes in a row with my family. You can really see the love and attention that went into the series from our team, the Humble Bee team and Bonham Carter herself; she made everything work so well, and her direction and narration has produced something quite special.”
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