Post Logic's Chris Keighly on Color Pipelines for Spots and Features

Chris Keighly, who joined Post Logic Studios last year as a telecine assistant after cutting his post teeth at Technicolor Creative Services, has been named technical supervisor of Post Logic's New York facility. The job gives him oversight over all projects completed at Post Logic in New York – mainly commercial spots that take advantage of color-correction and conform for HD – and charges him with make sure the post and DI pipelines are up to snuff. In an email Q&A, he talked to us about the new age of color-correction, the arrival of 4K workflows, and Elvis. (Yes, that Elvis.)
FILM & VIDEO: How does the pipeline at Post Logic Studios New York compare to the West Coast facility?

CHRIS KEIGHLY: The New York facility exists at the moment on a very different (read: smaller) scale than Post Logic Studios Hollywood. The Los Angeles facility has been around for decades and in the course of the last year or two, has solidified the digital-intermediate workflow as the crux of its infrastructure. Therefore, its pipeline is huge. Post Logic New York was built in 2004 solely for mastering film libraries in HD and our staff consists of a little more than a dozen dedicated employees mainly for this task. However, over the last year or so, we’ve gotten really creative with our existing equipment in realizing we could simply transpose its use for final HD color-correction and HD conform (using our Avid Symphony Nitris) for high-end commercial spots.

What's the biggest technical issue facing colorists in the next 12 months?

With everyone firmly on the software bandwagon, there are at least a half-dozen color-correction boxes available for a colorist to learn and, these days, clients don’t really care which one you’re utilizing or pretend to know the differences between them. They are expecting 100 percent total control over their image. Therefore, a colorist has had to become extremely adaptable with all these devices as he or she’s always on the cusp of losing his or her technical edge in this nutty business. It used to be that a colorist could master his or her hardware-based system, sit in the same chair every day, and every couple of years there were a few more gadgets thrown in by the manufacturer. But these days, a colorist has to be omnipresent and responsible for everything leading up to his or her time in the room with the clients and if something is suspect, he or she has to be able to figure out a solution really quickly for a problem that occurred weeks beforehand in scanning, DRS, conform or data management. The colorist can’t afford to ignore any aspect of the entire post-production process. In order to compete and stay specialized, the best colorists these days may have the title of colorist but are actually hyper-aware and technically competent with all the supplemental and complementary components of the post-production process.

How practical is a 4K workflow, and how often are those pipes getting used?

At Post Logic Hollywood, 4K is the ideal workflow for everyone and these pipelines are getting used all the time, so much so that they have dedicated plumbers to keep them flowing. In terms of practicality, I've always said that since there’s more than 4K of information on a 35mm film frame, it’s extremely practical to get as close as you can to a complete representation of the original captured image. For the artists (colorist, restoration guy, online editor) involved, they love having the leeway a 4k frame provides. It’s just too bad that it amounts to so much more data to transport, manage and the extra headaches it induces when machines crash and data gets lost are sometimes too much to bear. But I think it’s worth it. I’d love to see more shortform 4k work, because it does amount to an enhanced finished product and the short durations allow for greater operator efficiency/consistency all the while increasing the operators' comfort with a streamlined 4K workflow. We always tell feature filmmakers that 4K is the way to go for a feature film – it will absolutely help them make a better movie due to its advantages. But I have seen plenty of DIs where I would have specifically liked the movie less had they done a 4K DI – it looked obnoxious enough in 2K!

What's on your iPod?

Elvis Presley, Spring Tours 77. This was Elvis just before he died at his most ostentatious and despicable. But, because he was Elvis, he always attracted great musicians to play with him as his backing band, and this is true for this live album. The juxtaposition of an incoherent Elvis and a cogent band is endlessly thought-provoking to me. Jerry Scheff is one of the great bass players and James Burton is always so interesting to listen to and is one of my biggest influences as a guitarist. In general, I love listening to any music where I can hear the musicians actively trying really hard to sound good – so much so that they transcend boundaries, and maybe even make mistakes in the process.