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.”
Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.
Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.
But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.
"Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."
"Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More