How Germany's PICTORION Ran Color-Grading and Depth-Grading Simultaneously

Though moviegoers have had plenty of chances to catch stereo-3D fare at the multiplex, it’s only recently that 3D has started to take hold in the arthouse, as well. First there was Werner Herzog’s well-hyped Cave of Forgotten Dreams documentary (he even went on The Colbert Report to promote it!). And now there’s Pina, the Wim Wenders-directed documentary based on the work of modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch.

Pina took the top prize at Dimension 3, a 3D festival held late last month in Paris, and has been slowly rolling out internationally since its February Premiere in Wenders’ native Germany. A dazzling trailer (above) increased buzz about the film, but although Sundance Selects acquired U.S. rights to the film in March, a North American release has yet to be set.

Since we can’t tell you what we think of the film itself, here’s the technology story behind it, as related to us by the folks at SGO, developer of the high-end stereo 3D finishing system Mistika, which was used on the project from start to finish.

Pina was filmed mainly on a stereo rig outfitted with two Sony HDC-1500 cameras and ingested into Mistika’s native dual-YUV 10-bit JS format. (That’s not Javascript – JS refers to a proprietary Mistika format that provides uncompressed high-speed data handling.) The project was finished at German post facility PICTORION das werk, which combined different resolutions and formats on a single timeline inside Mistika.

Two weeks before the picture was locked, PICTORION gathered every shot that they expected to use in the final edit and started capturing them at full length, pulling them from more than 130 original tapes, in order to move the ingest process along. The crew flipped all of the mirror-rig eye shots to the correct orientation, then created a DPX data pool on PICTORION’s SAN. “It literally took seconds for Mistika to bring an offline edit to a high-resolution stereo-3D-conformed timeline, and even the VFX and grading departments could immediately start working from one data pool from the Mistika system,” explained Christian Troeger, one of the DI conform/finishing and stereo artists at PICTORION.

Depth-grading and color-grading took place at the same time, with Wenders working on the timing of the picture while on-set sterographer Alaine Derobe toiled away in the Mistika suite for more than two weeks. Mistika’s native functions gave Troeger a top-level view of convergence in any given scene and allowed him to make corrections to the right-eye and left-eye images in real time. Derobe and Troger worked in anaglyphic 3D mode on their monitor, but were also able to project full-HD stereo images on a silver screen.

Troeger and his colleague Sven Heck, also a DI conform/finishing and stereo artist, framed the image to a 1.85 aspect ratio as part of the image-tweaking process in the Mistika, rather than in the color-correction suite. The Mistika was also used for compositing, image stabilization, and other VFX-style retouching, as well as for European-language subtitles, which were generated in 2D but with individual titles placed at different depths that took the nature of each particular shot into account. The final DCP was delivered at 1998×1080.

For more information: www.sgomistika.com; www.wim-wenders.com; www.pina-film.de.