Lead Compositor Derek Herr talks about how his GenArts Sapphire suite helps him put the RX in the weekly drama

After early gigs in audio, The Post Group’s Derek Herr says he finally found his true calling doing online editorial work for various post houses in LA, including RiOT and The Post Group. Now the lead compositing artist at The Post Group, Herr and his colleagues do about 50% of the compositing and other finishing work on each episode of Fox’s popular drama, House, M.D. Herr has also worked on the main titles on the show, now in Season 6, for two seasons.
“When I started doing finishing work on an Avid Symphony at one facility, they had these funny things called Sapphire plug-ins,” says Herr. “And I’ve been using them ever since.” Herr uses Sapphire to tweak about 50% of the weekly drama series on Fox, which features approximately 50 – 100 effects shot per episode. The Post Group splits that work with another facility. “I used to work in a traditional way,” says Herr, “in a linear bay. Not anymore. The show lives in our compositing system, and the other facility delivers their shots to us on tape. I assemble it all on an Avid DS.”

Although Herr says he does “a lot of clean up work, like removing things from the set that weren’t supposed to be there,” he also uses his Sapphire filters to add in glows and other subtle treatments, as seen in the before and after shot, below.

The image, above, came directly from the dailies.

This shot, after color correction and compositing. Herr applied The Post Group’s special GenArts Sapphire plug-in treatment, seen in the glows around Dr. House’s head.

“I hate to admit it,” he confesses, “but I also use lens flares to glue composites together. I’ll find that a lot of the times, I’ll put a lens flare in the shot and I’ll dial it down until it’s almost unnoticeable, but where the flare crosses the composite line, I find it really helps to glue it up together. It’s just a little trick I like to use. It’s kind of like when others put in birds in the sky in a big exterior.”

Herr credits the show’s producers with pushing the envelope and supporting whatever new ideas he or his colleagues have. “They are really tech savvy and know exactly what they want and they are not afraid to take the show in a pretty radical direction,” says Herr. “It’s rare to be able to work with a team like that.”