Creative Post Breaks The Ice With Mistika

Supervising Editor Adrian Saywell at Toronto's Creative Post Inc. has recently revealed the challenges of grading the recent IMAX documentary Wonders of the Arctic 3D, and the reasons behind selecting Mistika for online colour correction and titling.

Wonders of the Arctic 3D marks Science North's fifth IMAX production in conjunction with Lickley and Giant Screen Films, based in Chicago, and has been distributed in more than 100 theatres around the world. The 42-minute film focuses on the effects of climate change to the Arctic environment and the impact on humans and animals, such as the Inuit peoples and Polar bears that reside there.
Creative Post started work on the film back in 2010 when primary shooting started. Mr Saywell said: "The first duties included onset processing and backup of Phantom footage. Once backed up and shipped to Creative Post, the processing of dailies for all digital formats in both Phantom and Red was completed using Mistika. This enabled us to create HD ProRes files with matching names and T/C’s for offline. Before we purchased Mistika, the Phantoms T/C would not match the QT created by other programs.
"Footage was supplied by DKP and Science North at various resolutions ranging from 4K to 8K in both 2D and 3D. Utilising the open platform that is Mistika, we were able to scale all the various formats to the end result 5616X4096, which was then filmed out to 70MM for IMAX Projection. As it is near impossible to work in 3D at the full 5.6K resolution, the proxy and render options in the Mistika enabled us to scale to 2K in 3D, where all work was completed before applying the corrections back to the raw camera material. This made it fast and easy to work in such a large format. Full online finishing, stereoscopic 3D alignments, colour correction and titling were performed in Mistika as well as final versioning in 5.6K 3D, 4K Scope 3D and 2K Scope 3D. New tools in version 7.2 enabled us to apply display filters such as log to linear LUTs as well as cropping of 1.85 and 1.79 images into the 70MM format without actually applying any FX to the environment."
Purchased in 2011, Mistika was chosen for its multi-resolution capability and 3D tools required for the 4K+ resolution that Creative Post master in. Online Editor Adrian Saywell was also able to use Mistika’s tools to stabilise and fix 3D shots, which included colour matching and alignment.
Senior colourist Jim Fleming was able to use the colour grading tools to pull the best images out of the footage.
Other high profile programmes Creative Post have recently worked on include Ice Road Truckers, Bollywood Star, High-Tech Red Necks, Ice Sweat and Tears and many others.

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(IT/CD)