Production company Mushroom Media has invested in a DaVinci Resolve 9.0 colour
correction system from Blackmagic Design to offer clients a fully-fledged premium
grading solution at its facility in Bryanston, Johannesburg.
Says Mushroom Media owner Warwick Allan: “We have had a keen interest in colour
grading for several years now. In fact, I myself have been colour grading over the
past six years, having trained in London through the International Colorist Academy
with Kevin Shaw.’
Allan notes that Mushroom Media previously handled colour grading on a range of
commercial, documentary, TV drama and music jobs for clients and saw the need for a
high-quality, cost effective, but more importantly, personal and craft-focused grading
solution in the Johannesburg market.
He continues: “We are running numerous GPU cards with the DaVinci to increase the
real time capability of the system. This means that when you add a number of
different nodes or corrections or keys or windows to a shot, you can push the “play’
button and it will process all the corrections at whatever your project’s frame rate is,
giving you a smooth playback of the shot to review instantly.
“A RED Rocket has been added in order to work fluidly with 4K & 5K RED raw footage.
The RED Epic camera has become very popular on high-end feature and commercial
productions so we wanted to be able to service that workflow effortlessly. Another
service we offer is transcoding RED raw footage to the proxy file type of the client’s
choice for offline editing. We also have the capability of working with ARRI raw
footage if the production chooses to shoot on an outboard recorder on the ARRI
ALEXA.’
According to Allan, DaVinci Resolve is still one of the most popular grading systems
worldwide and has historically been used to grade the majority of Hollywood feature
films produced since the 1980s.
“With the rise of more powerful computer hardware and faster, more affordable
storage systems, the software itself does not need the expensive outboard boxes
that used to accompany a high-end grading system. So you have the same tools that
were used to sculpt the most epic films of our time in this software. There are even
further advances in areas of keying: very flexible windowing, the most incredible
tracker as well as feature film quality image processing,’ he explains.
Mushroom Media works on a slightly different business model to the traditional big
facilities as it makes use of a network of highly experienced professionals that work
on a job to job basis. Allan is permanently based at the facility and takes on certain
grade projects personally but is also making use of Michele Wilson’s skills on high-
end commercial and specialist grading jobs.
“With her 15 years of grading experience in the Telecine and digital grading rooms of
Europe and South Africa on the biggest brands in the commercials market, Michele
brings a wealth of experience that can tackle the most complex and demanding
grading projects,’ concludes Allan.
By Joanna Sterkowicz
Screen Africa magazine – April 2013
