Smallville's strong workflow pipeline crosses the miles: footage shot in Vancouver finds its way to Santa Monica for HD post

Post, Oct, 2004 by Daniel Restuccio

BURBANK -- The WB's Smallville enters its fourth season with a superstrong post pipeline that successfully coordinates production and post production crews 1,200 miles apart in Vancouver and Los Angeles.

The show weathered a bumpy first season, finding its rhythm and style, and now 66 episodes later the logistically complex production is a model of creative, effective television making, knocking out an HD episode full of visual effects every week. Under the constantly attentive eye of executive producer Ken Horton (The X-Files, Millennium), post production involves the coordinated work of a number of companies, including Warner Bros. Studios, Media. Net, Rainmaker in Vancouver, Santa Monica's Entity FX and Modern VideoFilm in Burbank.

Horton started working on the show, about a teenaged Superman, during its first season, initially to help the show find its legs. He had worked with the show's creators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, in the past and they respected his opinion, so much so he ended up staying on to oversee post.

A lot of shows, he says, have a rhythm. They do one thing. Like in The X-Files "follow-the-clues" was a rhythm. Smallville is a little different. "This show has action, CGI, teenage angst, and a just-north-of-reality feel to it. Many times the rhythms of those things are in conflict with each other."

The way you harmonize those elements, Horton explains, is you don't go for the high-adrenaline, MTV-style or the jerky camera, find-the-action, approach of NYPD Blue. Horton had envisioned the show more in the classic style of director David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai). Make it a mini-epic, dress the scenes, let things find the camera, have the actors walk into the frame. In essence, he says, they are "doing a comic book that does not feel like a comic book."

THE PROCESS

The show's odyssey from super idea to super television starts in Vancouver, where the show is shot and begins its post production journey. The series averages eight days of principal photography and two days of second unit shooting per episode, according to Smallville producer Tim Scanlan. Cinematographer Glen Winter says they shoot mostly single camera, Super 35mm, threeperf, with a Panavision Millennium package, using primo zoom lenses. They shoot a lot of Steadicam. The each episode averages about 50,000 feet of negative, shooting mostly Kodak Vision 5279, 5248 for exteriors and some of the new 5217 for greenscreen.

At Rainmaker, the directors' selects are transferred to HDCAM masters on a Cintel C-Reality. Rainmaker president Barry Chambers says that for its first season. Smallville was a standard def show that transferred to Digi Beta. In the second season the show started posting in high definition. It was a network decision, says Scanlan. "Warner Bros, chose us and Everwood," and they picked up the additional cost to future-proof the show.

Now they transfer to Sony HDCAM and use the da Vinci's 2K color corrector to make a "best light" daily, Chambers explains, "We leave the black a little high, whites a little low, so later they can do a proper tape-to-tape color correction." He says they also use Oliver, a C-Reality dust busting technology, when needed. The HDCAM masters are shipped to Modern VideoFilm in Burbank where the online conform is done.

Smallville's digital dailies are encoded into two formats: MPEG-2 and Avid OMF files. Those files are uploaded to Media.Net, a secure, private network that connects Rainmaker to Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. Nicole Dezen, COO at Media.Net, says that first, everything gets routed through Media.Net's servers in Los Angeles. Several different locations have the capability to login and stream or download the files.

Scanlan says at Warner Bros, they make VHS dubs for the show's directors, producers, studio executives and post production staff. They also have the option of logging-in from their computers via a customized GUI that has an imbedded Windows Media player. The system is available 24/7, so almost immediately after telecine transfers are done at Rainmaker, footage is being cut by editors--David Ekstrom, Ron Spang and Neil Felder--on the three Avid Media Composers set up at the Smallville production offices on the Warner Bros lot.

THE EDITING

This season the editing team upgraded to Avid Meridien technology. Their new Avid system, notes Felder, is faster and allows them to work at a higher resolution in offline and has more storage.

From an editorial standpoint, says Felder, the show is "very simple in approach, but it doesn't come out simple." Even though Smallville is a "fantasy world," the characters believe it's real. So they expect real progressions to happen. Felder says that Horton's experiences on The X-Files and Millennium brings a sensitivity to that style. "He streamlines the show and makes sure the storylines make sense."

Felder says compared to when he edited Law & Order, cutting this show is like night and day. There are a lot more demands on the offline edit. "We pretty much come up with nearly a final product." This includes building a lot of temp visual effects and sound tracks right on the Avid.