The Look Rolls out DaVinci Resolve Studio for Picture Finishing
Blackmagic Design today announced that The Look, a post production company in London and Cardiff, has adopted DaVinci Resolve Studio as its hero system for picturing finishing, including color correction, conform services and finishing.
Founded by CEO and Senior Colorist Thomas Urbye in 2007, The Look now employs a team of 23, delivering 4K Dolby Vision (HDR) projects to Netflix, Disney, Apple, Sky and Amazon Studios, with long standing relationships with the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV Studios.
Recent projects picture posted by The Look include the BAFTA winning series finale of Netflix’s “Top Boy,” BBC’s BAFTA winner “The Sixth Commandment,” Netflix’s “Sex Education,” BBC’s “The Gold” and Disney’s “Renegade Nell.”
Senior Colorist Andrew Daniel (“All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Hijack”) also recently joined the facility.
CTO and Director of Online Mark Maltby has project managed the deployment of the new DaVinci Resolve Studio systems, employing a mix of physical and cloud based workstations to complement the picture team’s growth. That investment allows the facility to scale up resources as needed.
“The recent rollout comprised twelve systems in all; six are physical HP Z8 workstations while the remainder operate under an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud model,” explains Maltby.
There’s been a Blackmagic Design presence for several years at The Look. “We had a couple of Resolve workstations for remote grading,” recalls Maltby. “However, there have been developments for the system, such as its tracking and collaboration capabilities that we felt we were missing out on by not fully moving over to it.”
He continues, “Whereas before you might have to track a handful of scenes in a whole series, now every time a particular actor appears on screen, they’ll want to track their face and do some form of work. We’re forever putting shapes around things and highlighting them. That tracking work can even be shared across the color assistants in collaboration mode to improve the experience for our clients.”
Another deciding factor was scalability, with the move to DaVinci Resolve Studio enabling The Look to operate on both Mac and PC platforms, overcoming previous limitations. “Before, our capacity was restricted by how many workstations could connect to one server. We used to extend working hours to manage this. Now, we can add more IaaS workstations or purchase additional HP workstations as needed,” Maltby explains.
The Look has also upgraded its control hardware, acquiring four DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panels for its main suites and several DaVinci Resolve Mini Panels for technical operations, all supplied by Big Pic Media.
The new setup is already in use, with a completed project for the BBC and a major film for Studio Canal under its belt. “We currently have two big series going through; one is quite a complex job with multiple camera formats and both have a huge number of visual effects shots to drop in and grade,” he concludes.
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