London-based post house ONSIGHT recently relied on SGO‘s Mistika for the stereoscopic 3D postproduction of Giacomo Puccini‘s famous opera Madam Butterfly in 3D. Produced by Principal Large Format (PLF), and directed for cinema by Julian Napier, Madam Butterfly 3D is a co-production of RealD and the Royal Opera House. It was filmed last summer during live performances at the Covent Garden venue in London, and released exclusively in RealD 3D-equipped theaters.
ONSIGHT’s lab and post departments provided stereo 3D post services, ranging from managing the film’s lab requirements through to DI and cinema mastering. The 3D online of the project involved 3D offsets, alignment checks, color matching and stereo fixes on multiple in-house Mistika systems. As the production was shot natively in 3D, with convergence on background, the ONSIGHT lab team backed up and processed the rushes with pre-set offsets to prepare the files for comfortable offline editing by the film’s director and co-editor Stroo Olofsson.
Most of the material was recorded on ARRI ALEXA cameras, which allowed ONSIGHT’s colorist to create the desired filmic look. Mistika provided real-time playback directly from the Log C data files, which included the addition of non-destructive creative grading.
Mistika directly supports a wide range of file formats without the need to transcode, including ARRI RAW, which offered distinct advantages on this project.
ONSIGHT graded the final film in P3 Colour Space, using its recently installed Barco projection and RealD 3D Cinema System, which offers a true representation of how the film will appear to cinema audiences. The post team mastered the DCDMs for international distribution using Mistika, including re-versioning in seven languages.
“The stereoscopic element compliments the powerful arrangement and intimate original stage direction, enhancing the live opera experience to a wider audience,” said producer Phil Streather, CEO of PLF. “Julian [Napier] did a brilliant job of creating a new art form out of an existing one.”
“I’ve been shooting native Stereo 3D for 10 years and have traditionally had to spend far too much postproduction time finding workarounds to technical issues that no single platform had solutions to, that is until I used the Mistika system at ONSIGHT,” said Napier. “In expert hands, it handles all stereo 3D postproduction requirements elegantly and efficiently, affording more time for creative choices, thus helping to make Madam Butterfly 3D an unforgettable 3D experience.”
