When it comes to high-end grading, Baselight soon comes up. Reason enough to ask how it works with HDR material. And since the adverts for the Amazon series “Deutschland 86” are everywhere at the moment, Rotor Film is the perfect choice.

“Deutschland 86” is the second season of the series “Deuschland”, which tells the story of a GDR border soldier who is infiltrated into the Bundeswehr and thus experiences the last years of the GDR. The first season from 2015 was broadcast in the USA by Sundance TV, in England by Channel 4 and in Germany by RTL. Season two will be shown on Amazon Video in DACH.

Rotor was responsible for the picture and sound post-production of “Deutschland 86” and has also done a lot of work for UFA on the audio side. We spoke to Sebastian Göhs(bit.ly/sebastian_goehs) and Petra Lisson(www.petralisson.com).

DP: Can you describe the approximate process? And what material went into the grading suite?

Sebastian Göhs: We realised that the involvement of Amazon and the acquisition in 3.2K would result in quite a decent amount of deliverables – and that this would mean significantly more rendering time for us than for a normal project. Not to mention the VFX deliverables to be delivered.

In the end, we had 239.29 hours of raw material with 73.3 Tbytes over 100 shooting days – around 3 Tbytes of consolidated material per episode. The production team had decided early on to go for ProRes 4:4:4:4 for the acquisition and only use higher data rates for VFX shots.

It was also clear from the start that there would be two different language versions (with and without subtitles) as well as UHD and Full HD in HDR and SDR. It was therefore clear to me that we wouldn’t get very far with a conventional workflow if we wanted to meet the tight deadlines. Since a project like “Deutschland 86” has both budget constraints and hard deadlines, we streamlined the project as much as possible. This includes controlling the sample creation, the look preview on set and the usability of the dailies grade in the final phase.

Since we built our entire infrastructure around our Baselight systems with their dual 10GigE infrastructure, this workflow was very easy to implement using the various Filmlight products, even though a good part of the colour science and features we used were only released with Baselight v5.

We used Filmlight’s new HDR workflow including the new colour pipeline and the new HDR-capable print film simulations for the project directly in practice. Thanks to the very close contact with Filmlight, we were able to use the BLG workflow quite easily to pass on the Kodak film look decided in the look development to the post house in South Africa and the DIT responsible on set, Richard Muller. They were then able to work with the native grading tools in Baselight to quickly and precisely adapt the look to the conditions on set and the lighting situation.

However, it turned out that the vision of the showrunners and the DoPs changed over the course of the project to such an extent that we had to rework large sections in the final. But that’s the way it is with projects of this size. It’s all about getting the best out of the material. And the whole HDR thing was still pretty new territory for everyone involved in terms of acquisition and final colour correction. Another complicating factor was that we didn’t have as much influence on the Dailies software used on the set of the German shoot as we did in South Africa. We therefore had no usable grading metadata for the entire German shoot. This had to be compensated for in the preparation. “Deutschland 83” – the first season – had been graded oldschool without any colour management worth mentioning, which was completely out of the question this time given the sheer mass, the short time and the high editing frequency. There were also fewer episodes in “Deutschland 83”, and there was only one Full HD Rec. 709 delivery.

After various tests, I therefore decided that it was perfectly possible to grade the entire project in T-Log / E-Gamut colour space, working mainly with a target colour space of Rec. 709 at 100 nits. To check the highlights and the equipment on set and during dailies grading, you can switch the cursor colour space and the monitor to the respective HDR standard from time to time to check the effect, but until the final, everyone only sees the colour-managed Rec.709 image, which also went into the edit as DNxHD.

If Filmlight colour management hadn’t worked so incredibly well, we would have pretty much shot ourselves in the foot in the final. But with a little preparation time, we were able to finish grading the episodes in Rec. 709 in a very short time, add and adjust the VFX shots and then get the maximum out of the material shot in Arri LogC with a second grading pass in HDR and thus deliver absolute premium products for all UHD/HDR, UHD/SDR and HD/SDR deliveries, without having to make any compromises in terms of performance or the scope of keys and masks. The new base grade tool in particular has become my new tool of choice, where I was previously an absolute film grade fanboy. I have never been able to work so quickly and precisely as with this tool. I also think it has saved us a lot of grief and work in retrospect – and I have learnt to appreciate our Gen 6 Baselight 2 even more than I already did.

DP: Can you describe your workflow and division of labour?

Sebastian Göhs: The conforming of the finished episodes and the automatic transfer of the dailies grades from the existing timelines from South Africa was the responsibility of my dear colleague Petra. She also abstracted my other looks, which were then defined for the Germany parts in a further session with Matthias Fleischer and Kristian Leschner, with really impressive speed and transferred them to the long stretches without references, giving me an absolutely great starting point for the grading sessions with Matthias and Kristian.

Petra Lisson: We had received a very tidy project from the editing room that could be conformed without any problems for the most part. Smaller effects such as a few very sophisticated split screens were easy to realise in Baselight. Initially I only had problems with a few settings that showed perspective corrections, but these were not apparent from the editing room lists and could not be found in the Avid project. As it turned out later, these were corrections that had already been burnt into the samples in South Africa but were not documented.

DP: And what tools did you use apart from Baselight?

Sebastian Göhs: There were of course various tools that interacted with each other in the workflow. Starting with the absolute standard in editing, the Media Composer, Filmlight Prelight, Daylight and Baselight were used, whereby we initially worked with a patched 4.4m1, which was given the necessary colour management features by Filmlight in the pre-release stage, and then on the official release v5 in the final.

The large number of new tools in v5 were also extensively tested and used by Matthias Fleischer to adjust perspective, sharpness and contrast ratios in the material. Of course, this also includes the obligatory retouching, for which you no longer have to use a VFXer in Baselight. I do things like this during grading if it can be done quickly. Saves time and nerves for everyone involved.

DP: And what did the grading suite look like for a project like this?

Sebastian Göhs: We finished the project on a Sony X300 – and of course did various tests with consumer hardware in a parallel setup beforehand, but then decided that the quality of the X300 was more likely to indicate problems than the poorer picture of a consumer TV. We only checked the entire project with the Baselight’s internal scopes.

DP: Did you have to upgrade your hardware?

Sebastian Göhs: Apart from the X300 and the obligatory v5 upgrade for our Baselights, no upgrades were necessary. As we had planned the storage and network infrastructure (Baselights, network and storage) for 4K real-time finishing at the time, we were well positioned for the job. We were able to work directly from our large NAS storage in real time on the original LogC QuickTimes from the camera in full resolution.

DP: What subtleties did you underestimate in the preparation?

Sebastian Göhs: The fact that we couldn’t control the on-set solution of the German shoot as much as we would have liked meant that we weren’t provided with any usable metadata. As a result, a large part of the material ended up in the timeline without dailies grading, which we then had to adapt to the rest of the state by first determining the look with the DoPs and then using classic colourist work. Petra really excelled at this. Monochromatic artificial light sources are still a problem with footage, as they address the Alexa’s sensor in a way that generates values in the LogC, which are sometimes mapped into very extreme colours by the colour management. This must then be fixed with keys, masks or the new gamut compression tool.

DP: And which subtleties did you expect to be more difficult than they were during preparation?

Sebastian Göhs: Surprisingly, overexposures were rarely a problem, as they end up in the highlight compression in SDR and are so bright in HDR that you no longer notice them. If a lamp should be visible somewhere, it was quickly dealt with using a blur mask.

DP: How did you have to change your viewing habits for the new look?

Sebastian Göhs: Oddly enough, hardly at all. Thanks to Filmlight’s colour management, the look defined in SDR is reproduced extremely well in HDR, despite the much higher contrast. Curiously, HDR even looks better and richer with the look than SDR. After 5 minutes of watching HDR and switching back to SDR, we always had the effect of “What a pity”. HDR is definitely the future, I have no doubt about that.

DP: How do you explain the difference between SDR and HDR to someone if you don’t have a setup to show them directly?

Sebastian Göhs: Without being able to show HDR, it quickly degenerates into techno-babble and reading out numbers. Let me put it this way: in HDR, I have ten times the dynamic range and a much larger colour palette available at 1,000 nits to display the same image. This doesn’t mean that everything has to be much brighter and more contrasty, but rather that very brilliant highlights can now be much brighter than diffuse ones.

The same image can contain very rich and bright colours alongside very matt and barely saturated colours, and these differences are much clearer than in SDR. The whole picture appears more vivid and deeper, as if our brain were interpolating depth information from the higher resolution, colour and brightness, which does not actually exist in a 2D picture. It’s a much more realistic viewing experience and takes the image out of the abstract level that an SDR image on TV has. It’s just a picture on television. On a good HDR monitor, especially with HDR and HFR, you get the impression that you are looking through a pane of glass and the images come to life. This effect is a much clearer technological leap than from HD to UHD / DCI 4K, but of course it is much easier to demonstrate with a suitable setup. We show 5 minutes of graded material in UHD and SDR, sunny outdoor shots with blue skies and rich colours, water with brilliant highlights, cars with reflective surfaces, rather mottled images with low colour dynamics, dark night images with brightly sparkling city panoramas, explosions and then the same sequence in HDR. After the viewer has calmed down and sat down again after his dance of joy, we show the sequence again in SDR and say calmly in response to the “Ohhhhh … that doesn’t look … not so nice now” calmly and understandingly say: “And that’s the difference between SDR and HDR.”

DP: Let’s look at the delivery – how did you play out the master and how many variants did you make?

Petra Lisson: We mastered “Deutschland 86” completely in Baselight due to the HDR deliveries. Amazon had ordered HDR10, so we created a max. 1,000 nits HDR master with the PQ curve (SMPTE ST 2084) and a Rec. 2020 colour space container. Unfortunately, Baselight is not yet able to analyse the static metadata MaxFall and MaxCLL, which is why we had to use an external application for this.

We ended up with around eight BaselightScenes / timelines per episode, i.e. a total of 80 timelines. And these 10 episodes in UHD-SDR/UHD-HDR10, each in English/German/clean, plus recaps and textless reels, which had to be maintained and updated at the same time, especially during QC (quality control).

DP: If you were to make “Deutschland 87” – i.e. a third season – what would you do differently?

Sebastian Göhs: I would vehemently insist that the metadata-supported workflow be adhered to everywhere. Furthermore, it would be a very high priority to use Filmlight systems on set for pre-visualisation and dailies creation. If that’s not possible, I would at least make sure that we can work with the grading data from the dailies system. A lone ranger or “we’ve always done it this way, so I’m going to do it this way” mentality has only ever led to problems for everyone else at the back of the chain for as long as I can remember. I would also like to bring editing, VFX, grading and on-set even closer together. Keywords here could be BLG, remote grading and remote editing. On the audio side in particular, there is still a lot of room for development in terms of several departments working in parallel and synchronising their work.

At the time, I had developed a basic concept that was supposed to address these problems, based on available technologies and systems. However, it’s like all great plans and concepts: when they meet reality, they collapse – except for the grading part, which went great! (laughs)

However, the answer to these problems cannot lie in installing a Media Composer on a virtual machine in the data centre, streaming the GUI via remote desktop and believing that this will change the world. That’s a start, but in itself it’s just the old concept, which has only been put into the cloud by a trick. I’m talking about a real integration of the different departments of editing, sound design, VFX, mixing and grading in a framework that is database-based and provides every creative with the tools and view of the project that they need, thus virtualising administration and project management. It makes no sense to want to do everything with the same application. In my opinion, this only leads to lazy compromises and, on the software side, to an absolute development nightmare. So far, there is nothing that actually goes radically enough in this direction – but the topic is also anything but trivial. Adobe may have started the whole thing with its CC Suite, but the whole thing isn’t really well rounded either – apart from the fact that the internal tools from Premiere or AE don’t come close to the expertise, quality and performance of Filmlight, especially when it comes to colour correction.

DP: With the experience of what it can look like: What would your perfect home cinema for HDR movies look like?

Sebastian Göhs: I would go for a Sony X300 if it was available in a large size. Plus a nice Dolby surround setup in a black room with optimal acoustics.

Petra Lisson: Watching the final-graded episodes on the Sony X300 was very impressive. I really suffered at times, because I had the feeling that nobody apart from Sebastian and me would be able to watch all the episodes in this quality. The consumer HDR devices have not yet been able to keep up, especially when it comes to black levels.

However, I’ve heard that the new Sony HX310 is supposed to be even better than the X300, so I remain optimistic that things are progressing on the consumer side.