BTV Post Selects SGO Mistika

London's BTV Post turned to SGO's Mistika to provide post production for the five-episode television series How Cities Work, commissioned by Discovery.
Working with Electric Sky Productions, BTV Post ensured the series portrayed the footage in 2D as well as Stereo 3D formats.
Filmed in S3D, How Cities Work shows coverage of world-leading cities such as London, New York, Barcelona, Las Vegas, Berlin and San Francisco and their key advancements in planning, technology and engineering.
Ian Grey and George Dutton were the BTV Post colourists and online artists that put Mistika to work on the project.
Ian Grey explains BTV Post's approach for delivering the Stereo 3D post production for How Cities Work: "The production data was transferred over our ultra-fast connection between our Brighton to London facilities. We then completed the eye alignment, depth and colour grade using Mistika."
In addition, there were disparities in the S3D post caused by lens flare and dirt on the camera lens that required compositing from one eye to the other. George Dutton said: "If it wasn't for Mistika's compositing tools we would have lost some vital Stereo 3D shots from the series. Using a combination of these tools we were able to paint out disparities caused by lens flares and dirt by compositing from the unaffected eye.
"Mistika's auto alignment and colour balance tools worked brilliantly on most of the shots. When faced with the more complex challenges such as lens flares, extreme colour and focus mismatches, Mistika's manual alignment tools allowed us to fix these problematic shots very quickly as well."
Post Supervisor Chris Gallani said: "How Cities Work required a well planned workflow to be conceived within a relatively short space of time before filming. Luckily, our experience of working on major stereoscopic 3D productions helped us deliver a workflow that merged seamlessly with production. It was great to see it flourish into full, glorious 3D and 5.1 surround. The team were very happy with its delivery."
How Cities Work was filmed earlier in the year using a range of cameras including the Sony TD-300, with the media transferred via BTV Post's fast data connection for online and mastering on Mistika and editing suites. The deliverables were managed using Eclipse which is BTV Post's bespoke digital media management platform.
The series went on air last month on Sky 3D, with the 2D version scheduled for broadcast in March 2014 on Discovery.



(Images courtesy of Electric Sky Productions).
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