It’s ghost hunters time on Fox where the comedy series Ghosted debuts. The show follows a skeptic and a true believer in the paranormal, who are recruited by The Bureau Underground to investigate unexplained activities in the LA area, which may threaten the human race.
LA-based Mango (www.mango-la.com) and its family of companies handle all of the post for the new series: Mango does the dailies, New Edit provides the Avid system rentals and The Loft Post does the online and color grading. The companies continue to post Fox’s comedies Last Man on Earth, now in Season 4, as well as The Mick.
Ghosted shoots locally on Alexa ProRes 444 with standard LUTs in place. DP Grant Smith maintains close communication with Mango’s dailies colorist Nick Van Damme, sending notes and stills as references for what to accentuate and what to downplay in dailies color.
All dailies offline files are fed to editorial’s Avid ISIS shared storage so editors are ready to begin cutting the next morning on Avid Media Composer in their offices adjacent to the production in North Hollywood. Camera masters are piped to The Loft for loading to their SAN.
When the editors are close to locking an episode they send The Loft an offline bin to review so the post team is well prepared when the show locks and conform and the color grading gets underway.
Colorist Joe Cook
“The fun thing is that there is a very stylized look to the show, which changes with every paranormal location the buddies visit,” says colorist Joe Cook. He works on Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Studio as does online editor Dave McLaughlin. “There are day exteriors and night exteriors and interiors. They shoot under fluorescent and tungsten lights, and we either keep or change that look. Grant sets the look for scenes with our dailies colorist, so that’s already established when I do the final color. But Grant gives me a full palette to work with.”
Using an all-Resolve process, The Loft has established a collaborative pipeline that promotes smooth and rapid finishing. “Both online and color work simultaneously on the same project with realtime updates coming to Joe,” explains Chad Gunderson, vice president of operations at The Loft. “That’s one of the big benefits of the Resolve workflow. All editorial updates are seamlessly and instantly fed to Joe who works quickly with the executives and cinematographer without disrupting editorial.”
“The main benefit is collaboration at every step of the process,” says Cook who can mirror any room in the facility. The workflow is especially helpful given the show’s extensive VFX, which are temped and completed throughout the post process. “Editorial drops in shots, I color correct them and they immediately see the finished product,” says Cook. “I’m working with the same files editorial is working with.”
McLaughlin finishes episodes on his Resolve system, which Gunderson calls “flexible and user friendly” for the conform. “Resolve’s conform function is comparable if not superior to other industry-standard platforms,” Gunderson says. “Having one nice tidy project that can pass from room to room, session to session — clients love that. We’re able to push work through much more quickly than our competition.”
The Loft creates the show’s standard HD deliverables, a mix of tape and file-based products, for domestic and international broadcast.