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MillimeterDesktop DV
Aug 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
When Esteban Mora, postproduction supervisor at Citrica Studios in Miami, went into post for what be came an award-winning, DV short (El Gol), he had virtually no budget to make the imagery presentable for the festival circuit. He adopted an unusual methodology — doing all effects work and compositing in Autodesk's Combustion software, but also using it to color grade the entire 30-minute film. Mora's postproduction pipeline consisted of just three desktop tools: Apple Final Cut Pro (v. 4.5) to edit the piece, Autodesk Combustion (v. 4), and Autodesk's Cleaner XL to encode DV footage to different formats.
“The whole thing was shot on two different DV cameras [a Canon GL2 and a Canon XL1S] over the course of two years by different crews in different locations,” Mora says of his matching and color-grading challenges. “We also had to accentuate certain moments and moods.” He used Combustion for rotoscope and paint fixes, but also to make everything consistent. “It was tricky to give it a more filmic look, but still give a hint of the raw, crude feel of DV, which helped the continuity of our story.”
Cleaner XL ended up being an important tool, as well, because filmmakers had to routinely deliver different iterations of sequences to directors Jose Juan Posada, Juan Uribe, Leo Arango, and Alejandro Posada — all of whom were in different locations and receiving the media through varied means. “Cleaner let us encode different versions and send those versions out to different servers really efficiently,” Mora says. “That was a huge plus for us.”
