8G Postproduction Workshop, a Shanghai based postproduction company, has colored the first season of the Chinese version of the hit television singing reality show “I Am A Singer” with DaVinci Resolve.
The popular reality show airs on Friday night on Hunan TV, and each episode of “I Am A Singer” is shot on 38 cameras with different settings and various recording formats. Like any other weekly reality show, “I Am A Singer” has a very tight production schedule. The postproduction team had to create a 90 minute program out of 400 hours of footage within 8 days, with less than 20 hours allowed for color grading. 8G Postproduction Workshop deployed three DaVinci Resolves for this project.
The schedule was tight but some processes were time consuming. “Sometimes our colorists had to split the large media files from the editing team into individual shots before color grading. Fortunately, DaVinci Resolve’s automatic scene cut detection feature saved us time,” said Weida Xu, manager and colorist of 8G Postproduction Workshop. “If we got the EDL or XML, we could connect Resolve to the client’s SAN for conforming. Though there were many different formats, Resolve allowed native grading without the need for transcoding.”
Unlike a feature film or commercial shot following a pre written script on a controllable set, a reality show always attempts to record what really happens, even under poor conditions, which tends to result in shots with incorrect white balance or color casts. These problems had to be fixed in Resolve shot by shot. “Resolve’s real time processing ensures our efficiency,” said Xu. “Besides global color correction, we were also able to use many efficient secondary tools in Resolve for color corrections within a limited area. For example, we might need to track a person moving fast from point A to B. With Resolve’s automatic tracking feature, all we had to do is select the object, create the key frames and Resolve will automatically finish the rest of a very complicated tracking, which allowed us to further improve our production value within limited time.”
When they were done with color grading, the colorists also needed to check if there were any shots neglected. “DaVinci Resolve has a ‘Timeline Management’ functionality that helped us spot uncolored shots out of thousands of shots, perfect for TV shows with a number of shots or long form projects,” said Xu.
“Most colorists enter the field by learning Resolve because it perfectly matches colorists’ thinking. Its YRGB processing is a good example, which allows the colorist to precisely control blacks, midtones and highlights. Plus, DaVinci Resolve’s node based processing is more intuitive and allows you to master it easily,” added Xu.
About Blackmagic Design
Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and film restoration software for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including stereoscopic 3D and 4K workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Singapore, and Australia.
