Blackmagic Design announced that its DaVinci Resolve Studio and DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel were used to complete picture post in Ultra HD 4K on the third season of award winning Canal+ French drama series, “Le Bureau des Légendes.”
Postproduction for the 10-part series now available on Amazon Prime was completed at Paris-based Digital Factory by freelance colorist Guillaume Lips. “Not only did we grade the entire series from beginning to end in Resolve, but we also delivered in Ultra HD 4K for the first time,” he shared.
The turnaround for completing the DI on each episode was incredibly tight according to Lips. “With only two days to complete an episode, our workflow needed to be both fast and efficient. Not only did Resolve’s realtime performance provide first-class shot tracking but it also meant that we could work with the project native materials in 4K.”
While the main unit captured to ProRes 4444, there was a whole raft of smaller cameras used by the production’s second unit to shoot the action scenes. “Resolve’s extensive format and multi-codec support proved invaluable,” explained Lips. “We carried out a basic technical grade to adjust contrast levels and correct for the differences in color space and that gave us our starting point for the final DI.”
When grading scenes from Syria, Lips drew on DaVinci Resolve’s extensive toolset and a series of power windows to unlock the rich deep tones and add a large amount of contrast while still retaining enough detail in the highlights and shadows.
“In order to achieve that, I used the HDR capabilities in Resolve to finesse the midtones,” he said. “And when it came to skin tones I wanted to bring back as much softness as possible to mitigate any over-definition resulting from the 4K delivery which Resolve proved highly adept at handling.”
Lips concluded, “As an experienced colorist I have worked with a lot of different grading systems in my career and I firmly believe that DaVinci Resolve remains one of the very best in the market today. Used alongside the DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel you have a very efficient way of working, which allowed me to complete the grade on this particular project in record time.”
The Oscars Are More International Than Ever. But Is The International Film Category Broken?
For many filmmakers, the Oscars are a pipe dream. But not because they think their movies aren't good enough.
The Iranian director, Mohammad Rasoulof, for instance, knew his native country was more likely to jail him than submit his film for the Academy Awards. Iran, like some other countries including Russia, has an official government body that selects its Oscar submission. For a filmmaker like Rasoulof, who has brazenly tested his country's censorship restrictions, that made the Oscars out of the question.
"A lot of independent filmmakers in Iran think that we would never be able to make it to the Oscars," Rasoulof said in an interview through an interpreter. "The Oscars were never part of my imagination because I was always at war with the Iranian government."
Unlike other categories at the Academy Awards, the initial selection for the best international film category is outsourced. Individual countries make their submission, one movie per country.
Sometimes that's an easy call. When the category — then "best foreign language film" — was established, it would have been hard to quibble with Italy's pick: Federico Fellini's "La Strada," the category's first winner in 1957.
But, often, there's great debate about which movie a country ought to submit — especially when undemocratic governments do the selecting. Rasoulof's fellow Iranian New Wave director Jafar Panahi likewise had no hopes of Iran selecting his 2022 film "No Bears" for the Oscars. At the time, Panahi was imprisoned by Iran, which didn't release him until he went on a hunger strike.
Rasoulof's film, "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" — a movie shot clandestinely in Iran before its director and cast fled the country — ultimately was nominated for best... Read More