300's HD Pipeline

&nbspCheck out The Briefing Room's coverage of 300

Curiously, one of the biggest draws at the HD EXPO event in Los Angeles earlier this month surrounded a movie that was shot entirely on 35mm film. In a standing-room-only theater at the Beverly Hills Hilton, eager attendees listened in rapt attention to a presentation from Chris Watts, visual effects supervisor on the hit effects'' movie, 300. Watts spent about two years on the film, which is based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley.

With its muted tones, evaporating blood, and bronzed flesh, 300 sports a much discussed visual look that is far different from standard effects'' fare. Almost the entire movie, except for early establishing locations, was shot against bluescreen in a warehouse in Montreal.

Based on the 480 BCE battle of Thermopylae, where an army of Persians beset a small Greek force of Spartans, 300''s warriors are all rippled muscle, gold helmets, and red capes brandishing spears and swords and ferocious visages. To capture all of this, the decision was made to shoot on Kodak 5229T stock at 150fps.

Despite the decision to shoot film, 300 relied greatly on HD technology for dailies used to both visualize the evolving movie and abet project management on the extensive visual effects sequences. What it came down to was figuring out a way to manage a pipeline that saw material farmed out to 10 different vendors in four countries on three continents.

“In the final version of the movie, there are 1,523 cuts,” Watts told the packed room. “[1,006] of them are visual effects, which is a little bit less than other movies I''ve done, like Pleasantville, which had 1,660 cuts. I got to say, the stuff in this film was a lot more difficult. Pleasantville was essentially one gag repeated a lot times. In 300, just everything was a pretty unique gag that required some kind of original thinking for every sequence.”

Watts knew he would be generating a lot of temps along the way, so he designed a unique HD-based system to handle the work, with a database he developed to make sure every frame was in lockstep.

“We shot on film. We transferred all of the film to basically three flavors of media—two of them HD,” Watts recently told HD Focus. “The first was just regular old Avid [disk-based] media. The second was HDCAM-SR tape, and the third was HD res QuickTimes, using the DVCPRO HD codec. For whatever reason, it''s supposed to be like a 60i codec, but it actually works great at 24p. It''s kind of a weird hack. Somebody at Apple told us about it.

“Essentially, it makes a 1920x1080 QuickTime that will play back at that res. Instead of playing back at 1080i, it plays back at 1080p—24p. It works great. It''s pretty low data rate. It''s about 100megabits, and it color corrects great. It looks great. There are no ugly temporal artifacts. It''s purely a spatial codec, so you can edit with it. It''s a really great thing.”

For these primary element temps, Watts decided to use the HD QuickTimes as his workhorses—they were used for concept art, as well as for Apple Final Cut Pro assembly work. Watts figures the conversion of film material to the HD QuickTime files cost the production about an extra $600 a day, a nominal sum because he considers the QuickTime files fundamental to the success of 300''s postproduction workflow.

However, HDCAM-SR tape was still essential to the process, as well. First, it served as back up for the film negative. Second, for certain background elements that needed to be replicated but not seen in great detail, instead of scanning thousands of frames over and over, filmmakers used HDCAM-SR tape to master those elements.

“We shot a lot of film on 300, as you might imagine, shooting at high-speed,” Watts recounts. “We shot a lot of elements of extra guys. Not all those elements needed to have perfect color fidelity. They didn''t necessarily need to match—we knew we were going to crush the hell out of them anyway in [final color correction]. So, for many elements of the movie, the HDCAM-SR telecine, which is essentially the dailies transfer, became our [virtual] film master for some of those elements. We used those for all the extra councilmen in the council chamber scene, all the Spartans walking around—basically, any background characters were mastered off the [HDCAM-SR taps]. [That] saved us a lot of time and money, and also enabled us to offload a lot of the creative work to vendors, because we could just send them HDCAM-SR tape for the dailies, and they could pick whatever they wanted to. They could just load the whole thing into their Inferno realtime, and then add that to their library, and just have the liberty to pick these extra guys out wherever we need them, rather than having to go through the whole editorial process of scanning everything. So, it was a tremendous time and money saver, and it was absolutely worth the initial battle to get that done.”

Managing this workflow could have been a bigger headache than a Spartan broadsword, but Watts avoided that battle early on.

“The QuickTimes that Technicolor generated for us—they obeyed the ALE that was generated for the HDCAM-SR tape and for the Avid media. Basically, frame one of the Avid media and frame one of the HDCAM-SR tape, and frame one of the QuickTime were all the same frame.

“Over the course of my career, I''ve been developing a visual effects database asset manager. What this database was able to do—because it knew where all the QuickTimes were and what their timecodes were and where they lived, because they were all laid out on disk according to a fairly rigid naming convention—it knows how to translate timecodes between 24 frames and 30 frames. And because we were able to read a 30-frame Avid EDL that referred to the current version of the cut, it was able to actually import the Avid EDL, reference that to the HD QuickTimes, both of the dailies and of the effects shots that the vendors gave back to us, and generate a Final Cut XML file, which then could be loaded into Final Cut Pro. In a matter of a couple of minutes, we could assemble the entire movie from an Avid EDL as a Final Cut XML project, and screen our movie in HD at any moment.”