ARRI Stage London
Case Study - In partnership with Creative Technology
“Why doesn't the image look the same on my phone as it does in the grading suite....?”
The phrase every Colourist has heard before and will hear again.
Now, go stand in the middle of the ARRI Stage London in partnership with Creative Technology. You’re surrounded by hundreds of square meters of screen real estate - so
not ‘just’ the typical 31” monitor you’d find in the grade suite then - and you're about to throw up some background plates onto the LED panels. Let’s call these 'the wall'. An assault on the senses ensues, as for the first time you try
to take it all in. You effectively have a huge 'organic' light source in which to immerse your actors and build your scene. Exciting, but now the process of balancing the scene comes to the fore and familiar thoughts start to occur...'the
plates on the wall don't look like they did on the monitor when we shot them'....not exactly the same situation as the grading monitor vs. the phone scenario but parallels can certainly be drawn!
“Getting in touch with Scan resulted in a DaVinci Resolve system speedily arriving to facilitate the process”
Working with CT, I was called in to trial the idea of a grading station near-set. Getting in touch with SCAN resulted in a DaVinci Resolve system speedily arriving to facilitate the process. With the latest GPU offerings from NVIDIA housed in the
3XS system's tower and fast Gen.4 PCIe storage, this acted as a reliable machine for the trial.
With some workflow design, it enabled us to 'grade' the wall if needed, effectively adjusting a plate in realtime and looking at the result
on a grading monitor, through the camera lens. Various LUTs could also be created and exported if required and on top of that it also acted as a playback station to confidently review the rushes.
System Specs for Creative Technology
• AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper PRO 3955WX, WRX8
• ASUS AMD Threadripper Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE
• Samsung M393A2K40DB3-CWE DDR4-3200 ECC
• 3XS PNY NVIDIA A6000 48GB GPU
• Samsung 1TB 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD
• Corsair 4TB MP600
CORE M.2 PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD
• 3XS Custom Server
• 3XS System Build
• 3 Year Warranty
• 16GB Scan 3XS USB3 Flash drive
• 3XS Windows 10 GML H17-10001
• 3XS NZXT Kraken Z73 LCD AIO CPU Water Cooler
• 3XS Corsair
RM1000x 1000W Modular Gold PSU
• W10 Windows 10 Pro High End DPK MUP-00003
• Blackmagic Design DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G SDI
The Scan Partnership
The idea of a Colourist making adjustments to what is essentially the immersive light source - 'the wall' - in collaboration with the team on set, is quite the ride and the possibilities and workflows for the future very interesting indeed....and that's before we even start talking about the use of Unreal Engine and the world of colour in the virtual world!
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