NEW YORK — Technicolor-PostWorks, New York completed editorial conforming and final color grading for Disney’s new film,Into the Woods. The facility was selected, in part, because of New York State’s generous tax incentive for post production, as well as for the studio’s experience in managing large and complex features, such as
Noah and
The Giver.
Into the Woods’ picture and sound editorial teams set up shop in the same Manhattan building, allowing director Rob Marshall, a New Yorker himself, to oversee grading and work with the sound and picture editors. Elements arrived from a variety of locations. Original Arri Raw camera files were processed at Technicolor in London, where the film was shot, and were shipped to New York on LTO drives, along with a full instance of the media on a NAS device. VFX arrived from MPC, Montreal, the lead house, and from a half dozen secondary suppliers.
Conforming and grading were done at 3K using 2,880x2,160 DPX files derived from the camera source material and supplied VFX. The facility employed Autodesk’s Flame and Lustre for conforming and grading respectively, a tandem that allowed conform editor Eric Leverenz and colorist Tim Stipan to work from the same data files.
“Our workflow is very fluid in terms of keeping up with editorial changes and visual effects updates,” Leverenz reports. “Whenever I received a change, I’d drop it into the timeline and it would be available in the color session almost immediately. That helped us keep track of the various versions of visual effects and ensured that Rob Marshall and DP Dion Beebe, who were downstairs in the DI theater, were seeing the latest material and didn’t get any surprises.”
To speed delivery of VFX elements, Technicolor-PostWorks set up a dedicated high-speed network connecting MPC and other vendors with editorial in New York.
“QuickTimes were sent to editorial; editorial cut them in and provided an EDL to Eric; Eric cut in the DPX files, published a new sequence and delivered it to color,” explains post supervisor Jennifer Lane. “We had a very good system and it worked well.”