Beta Sight: Avid DS Assist Station
Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Dermot Shane
Flexible DI leads to creative freedom.
Visual-effects Editor Dermot Shane and Director Vic Sarin spent 300 hours finishing Partition, a drama based in India, using an Avid DS Assist Station for effects and DI.
My theory is that the best DI is not always the one with the $250,000 machines in $1-million rooms (and $4,000-per-day rates). It is the DI that serves the film the best, tells the story the best, makes the deadlines, and works in what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG). In our case, it's best done with a $25,000 setup and a lot of time to be careful, be creative, take chances, experiment, and spend time seeing if “what if” works — and loving it when it does.
Partition is a film set in India circa 1947 — a Romeo-and-Juliet story in a time of almost unimaginable political and social upheaval. The film was co-written, directed, and shot by Vic Sarin, based upon an incident that happened in his hometown when he was growing up in Kashmir.
Vic asked me to help throughout the process, from script to final print, so I took on the roles of the visual-effects editor, post editor, and DI supervisor, as well as artist. Sometimes I was a camera operator (for the big action scenes), and I also shared the colorist duties. This was a rare opportunity to work on a great film intensely and creatively, and although it was difficult at times, it was rewarding.
For Partition, we shot mainly on Kodak 5205 (50 ASA daylight), we used natural light whenever possible, and we relied upon the capabilities of the digital intermediate to manage the image and keep a very natural look to create a documentary style inside a drama structure. Knowing what we could (and could not) do in DI was, therefore, paramount. Vic shot masters and wide shots first and last thing in the day — gaining the hour of amazing light when the sun is close to the horizon — and then he used the midday sun through silks to shoot the coverage.
I had finished a film a few months earlier using a well-regarded DI system in a well-known facility, but at $4,000 per day, the room was just too expensive to play around in, and we felt we compromised the final film to make a budget work. With that film, we had the opportunity to entirely redo the color timing when the distributor asked for editorial changes, and we turned to the Avid DS Assist Station — a truly priceless creative tool — which gave us maximum creative input and the ability to evaluate and change without feeling financial pressure to move on quickly.
Based on that experience, for Partition, we invested in a DS Assist Station — the full Avid DS Nitris software running on an HP workstation but without the Nitris video box — for 4:4:4 finishing. We installed a Sony Qualia projector feeding from the DVI port, and we rebuilt our room to create a well-controlled workplace. CineByte created custom LUTs for the filmout, using the decidedly low-cost but accurate Spider-II probe to maintain alignment, which we loaded into the DS software's color-timing module.
Partition was shot with spherical lenses for a Cinemascope release and, because 2.35:1 in HD has almost the same number of pixels as a 2K scan, we transferred all the dailies on a 2K Spirit using Dmin/Dmax to HDCAM SR tape in RGB 4:4:4 mode. This approach gave us instant access to any of the rushes for visual effects, which moved our lightning-fast post schedule from possible to realistic.
We worked on the visual effects (more than 180 shots) as editorial went along, starting with low-res temps taken from the Avid offline to our DS Assist via MXF media and conformed exactly as editor Reginald Harkema had cut the scenes — including any opacities, ramps, or repos. As cutting progressed, we started working effects with RGB 4:4:4 footage, mostly inserting actors shot in Canada into a plate shot in India and demodernizing 2006 India to the non-electrified India of 1947. So far, no one has been able to tell us what we shot in Canada — even people who grew up in Lahore, Pakistan.
We then used the DS Assist system to create and grade prelocked cuts and incorporate change lists from Avid bins to lock reels. We graded scenes as many as five times as we saw the film in context and realized some ideas just were not working in the arc of the story, even though the scenes themselves looked great. We had the ability to try ideas out, take a break, and come back to it with fresh eyes and attitudes. It is a priceless and rare option to go too far just to find out where too far is.
As our core tool, DS Assist proved itself in both visual effects and in the DI process, and it is how we see ourselves moving into the future, with the payoffs being massive creativity, flexibility, and stability. The system's integrated roto, keying, and paint tools are rock solid, and the video deliverables are amazingly easy to create. I often switched the timeline to YUV 4.2.2 for dustbusting, and for roto, it took seconds to change from RGB 4:4:4. We also used this feature to create the video deliverables, and we retimed a few scenes and pan and scanned for the 16:9 and 4:3 versions straight from the DI timeline in YUV mode.
We spent more than 300 hours finishing this film, and at the end of the process, when Vic and I watched the first married print in the theater, we really felt the film — from the dry, dusty red earth of the north India plains through to the garden in London — remained true to the vision that he had held inside himself for 30 years.
Throughout this process, we made no compromises, and the real return on the investment in owning our own DI solution is in creativity and the freedom to tell a story to the best of our ability. We won on all fronts — technically, creatively, and financially.
Our setup then was a DS Assist Station on an HP xw8200, an Avid disk array, and a Sony Qualia projector. Our current spec is a DS Assist Station on an HP xw8400, an Avid disk array, an AJA Xena I/O card, and a Sony Qualia projector.
Currently, we are completing the feature film And the Beat Goes On, a look at the rise of house music in Ibiza, Spain, and we are in prep for A Shine of Rainbows, also a feature to be shot in Super 35 for Cinemascope using the same production and post methodology.
Dermot Shane is a Canadian colorist and visual-effects editor whose credits include Treks in a Wild World, Beast Wars: Transformers, and The Birthday.
