Speaker 1: Hey Indie Mogulers, I just wanted to start off by saying thank you for all your great feedback last week, thanks for watching The Safe Room, we really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: And thanks for the subscribing, we always like that.

Speaker 1: Alright, so this week we're going to be talking to you guys about post-production. We have a couple segments, we're going to talk about how we ingested the footage and created proxy footage, how we did all of the VFX, and the color grade, and I'll touch a little bit upon editing and finishing as well. One of the biggest obstacles that there was, was the fact that we did want to do a 4K finish, so through our entire post-production pipeline we had to make sure to maintain the 4K files which were not easy to work with.

Speaker 2: Especially in the visual effects end, it's like, it was weird.

Speaker 1: Yeah. But that said, I just want to say before we start that this is not meant to be a tutorial, this is really just an overview of how we did this stuff to, you know.

Speaker 2: Just our general workflow and just, you know, just the basic concepts behind it.

Speaker 1: So here's our first segment, it's about how we ingested the footage and how we created our proxy footage and why. Alright, so before we even got to, like, edit or do anything with this footage, the first thing that we had to do was create proxy footage. The proxy footage exists to be easier on your computer, alright, so obviously, like, I'm not going to want to be editing with, you know, the raw 4K red footage. It's going to be slow and it's going to be absolutely miserable. If you edit in Premiere, you can usually do it anyway, but I edit in Avid and it's just easier to make proxy footage. Basically we come in here, you know, we've got all of our footage from the entire shoot and I'm just going to basically select everything and I'm going to do an export. And this is where I'm going to basically make my proxy footage. So since I'm editing in Avid, I'm going to want MXF footage and I'm going to want 1080p, 23.976, and the highest compression, crappiest footage I can possibly make. That's what I'm making right now. Okay, debayer settings, just as low as possible for the one that we're making because, again, this is just for my purposes to edit with. This is just for my purposes, literally just to edit with. So what's going to happen is I'm going to bring this into Avid, I'm going to cut the film, I'm going to sync up all the audio, and then when the cut is done, done, just totally done, I'm going to send an AAF into DaVinci Resolve and I'm going to basically tell Resolve, okay, this was proxy footage, link back to the real footage, and Resolve is going to import my project as it was in Avid with the proxy footage, but this time it's going to have the red clips in place of the proxy clips, so I'll be able to relink back to the high quality footage to do my final output. So I would do this, click export, and it's going to take forever and it's going to render out the red footage. And that's the first step in the pipeline.

Speaker 2: Now for one of the single most underappreciated parts of filmmaking, the color grading section.

Speaker 1: Hey guys, Nick here, and I'm going to talk to you about how we color graded the safe room. So we graded on the original red files, 4K, so in order to color grade on the red files you need some serious horsepower, so I work on a Mac Pro with a third party graphics card and a Blackmagic Design capture card, which I use to output my video signal to my Flanders Scientific grading monitor. You really need to be using an external monitor if you color grade, otherwise your grade isn't going to transfer nicely to other monitors. Like I said, we graded on the reds, the only time that we didn't was when we were working with ProRes clips, which were what we used when we had to do VFX shots. I would render out a ProRes clip, Paul would do the VFX, and I'd get it back and I'd grade that. So I wanted to show you guys a couple quick grades just so that you kind of get an idea of what we had to do on this film. This is a shot where Greenglass is getting up out of his car. Okay, one thing you're going to notice is that this is a VFX clip, but this is before the VFX were applied, we removed the registration, the 2013 registration, so in the actual film that's not there, that's been replaced, but for our purposes here this is fine. So this is how it comes out of camera, it's on the Red Log Film Gamma Curve, if you want you can use Red Gamma 3 or something, you have a different starting point, but I think you get the nicest result from starting here at Red Log Film. So the first node here I've got just a base grade, you can see it introduced a couple problems, the car is blown out now, it's too bright, and I'll just turn on the scopes so that you guys can see that, anyone who knows how to read the scopes, usually I work with external scopes, but this is so you guys can see. Okay so, and also another problem is Felix's jacket is blown out, so you'll see, I'll come over here in node 2, turn that on, that's off, that's on, you can see the details brought back, I also have this window motion tracked, I just brought the highlights down in that node on just his jacket, and that's a lot nicer looking. Okay, node 3, this is where I fixed the car, you can see I'm bringing all that detail back, I'm fixing the colors, this was just an isolation, no tracking, no windows, just isolating those colors, that stays with it. Last node, just a quick gamma correction, just makes everything look a little bit nicer, so you can see we've got the before, and the after. This is sort of a take on the blockbuster look where everything is kind of tealish blue except for skin tones, so to do this, I'll just turn all these off, again, started here from red log film, doesn't look that great, but it's a better starting point. This is a Kodak lookup table that I put on here, I got that from Juan Malara, so I'm coming in here now, and this is just a general tweak up on this node, and these three nodes here are really where the look is going to come from. This top node here is what's going to give everything that blue push, it's hard to see because it doesn't update in here until all three of these are on, because they're working together, but if you look closely at this node, you can see it's all blue, including his skin, everything. This node is a similar story, but I'm bringing back the whites of his lab coat, and when I turn this on, you're going to see the result of all three of these, which is that, and you can see, his skin is not washed out and blue like in these, because in this node, I've done an isolation on his skin, I've isolated his skin, I've pulled the skin from the previous nodes in, and I've just pushed a little more flesh tone in there, so it just looks a lot more natural. You can get away with a lot if your skin looks good. So that's the before, that's the after. So like I mentioned in the video before, now Paul's going to talk to you about his visual effects.

Speaker 2: As I've mentioned in the past, there are two kinds of VFX in my book. There are the ones that you plan out for cool shots that you think are going to look cool, and then there's your oh crap effects. This would be an oh crap effect. We did this shot, the car's beautiful, however, some of you who are clever might notice what's wrong with it. Apparently this car is registered for the next 63 years. Now that's just something we didn't quite notice. So we're going to fix it. How do we fix it? That is actually kind of simple. What we did was we took this into Mocha, and to take it into Mocha, you go to Animation, Track in Mocha, and we tracked that shape. You can see the null object follows it perfectly. It'd take a little bit of finessing, but we got it there. Now once that was there, we simply went into Photoshop, created this, and we created once again that. Now we took those two images, we attached them to the null object. Now that looks pretty horrible. No one's going to buy that. So how do we get them to look better? Well, we do a corner pin to make sure that it fits, a little bit of an edge blur. Then we do a little bit of a box blur because the focal distance and all that good stuff, it wouldn't really be that in focus. And then, as Nick told you, a little bit of color grade action. We do the same with the other one. And now, you would never know. So we've got a little parking permit thing, and yeah. Now for an actual planned visual effect. See, it's important to know what you need for the effect that you're going to create because it makes your visual effects artist life a lot easier. So let's turn all these layers off. So what did we do to get that in there? These two little bits right here, label tracking data TV1, tracking data TV2, are the tracking data for the TV. It makes sense, I know. We went over here, we took this and we brought it into Mocha, and I put a nice little mask around this shape and got our tracking data. Now that tracking data was brought in to our composition. Now once we had the tracking data for these two shots, we were able to take our video clips and drop them in. And now there's one really, really important thing you've got to do. What we did was we duplicated the base, which is the actual clip with the TV, and we dropped the opacity. We masked around the TV. Now what that does is that takes some of the detail, like the highlights, and it creates a reflection. This is the difference between your effect looking like that and looking like somebody just superimposed it on there, and your effect looking like it belongs in the scene. It's a simple touch, but it's the little touches that make the difference, especially with an effect like this. So those are two effects from the movie, and we'll be posting more in-depth tutorials for those who are interested.

Speaker 1: As I mentioned to you guys before, I edited this in Avid Media Composer. I feel it's the non-linear editor to use. It made working with the proxy footage easy. It made relinking footage easy. You guys know what editing is. Obviously there's no need for us to go into a whole video about it.

Speaker 2: So that's that. We're really glad that you guys watched the movie. We're sorry that we spoiled a bunch of stuff in the post-production video, but you should have seen it already. Spoilers. You knew that coming in, but that's okay. And as always, if you have any questions, you want to know any specific details, leave a comment on either this video or the safe room itself, and we will answer them.

Speaker 1: Yep. Thanks for watching, guys. If you haven't seen it already, go check out the safe room, and see you next time.