L.A.-based post house DigitalFilm Tree recently relied on Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve for color correction of ABC’s show Mistresses. As part of the postproduction workflow, DigitalFilm Tree grades all of the show’s dailies remotely at its L.A. office, doing in eight hours what used to be a two day project.
Mistresses looks at the lives of a group of four girlfriends, each on her own path to self-discovery. The show is now in its third season, and DigitalFilm Tree has provided all post services, including remote final color correction, since the show’s start.
As part of the production for the new season, which premiered this June, Mistresses used new software that DigitalFilm Tree developed in house called Critique and ProStack, which uses DaVinci Resolve as a core component of the service. Remote dailies grading and transcoding are done with DaVinci Resolve. All RAW camera files, viewing and editorial files are kept on the ProStack cloud server at DigitalFilm Tree’s Los Angeles facility.
Using DaVinci Resolve for color correction, online editing and transcoding for the services, Critique, a cloud based review-and-approval system, allows the entire postproduction team to collaborate without needing to be in the same location, while ProStack is a software-as-a-service product built on the Openstack platform that manages every aspect of the postproduction pipeline via the cloud.
“It is just a tremendously effective way to create traditional dailies and remote cloud-based dailies for our productions around the world,” said Ramy Katrib, CEO of DigitalFilm Tree. “We orchestrate all this from our facility in L.A., while we set up our systems where the production is. With Mistresses being in Vancouver, we use DaVinci Resolve every day to transcode dailies, apply LUTS and/or real-time dailies color, no matter where our dailies colorist is located in the world. No more dealing with shippers, overnight delivery or dealing with customs or waiting for drivers to navigate traffic to get to us. Using our ProStack, we are able to easily transport, store and make all the show’s RAW files accessible to our clients. This is the future of dailies, and Resolve makes that possible.”
In addition to color correction, DigitalFilm Tree uses DaVinci Resolve for online editing last-minute changes and VFX drop-ins.
“With Resolve, the entire post workflow is simple and it works seamlessly with any of the other post software we use,” Ramy added. “We go from using Resolve on the dailies, straight into editing to conform and then over to Resolve for final grading and any final online editing and tweaks that we need.”
“Remote dailies, using DaVinci Resolve, has reduced a two-day turnaround for remote productions to less than six hours, allowing post to reclaim over half of its precious time,” said Guillaume Aubuchon, CTO, DigitalFilm Tree.
