I just finished color correcting That the World May Know Set 9, produced by The Image Group and Grooters Productions for Focus on the Family, featuring Ray Vanderlaan.
This set was filmed by our crew over the course of 24 days on the Sinai peninsula and features about 3 hours worth of footage. After months of script writing, editing, music composition, motion graphics creation and illustrations drawn, every element comes down to my office to be reassembled in full HD quality in the on-line edit. Once all these elements were gathered, we re-digitized thousands of shots from over 400 video tapes. Now it is time to color correct and do hours of fine tuning, in multiple passes.
The first pass for me was doing color correction. These episodes were shot in High Definition with 3 Panasonic Varicams with a 720p resolution at 24 frames per second. The challenge comes in matching the color and contrast of 3 cameras that were operating out in the bright sun in the middle of the desert. Another interesting element is that the desert earth tones are at times a pinkish / red hue which is very close to the flesh tones of our teacher and his students. The color of the desert also changes depending on what terrain they are in. All of this makes matching sand color and flesh color a good challenge in keeping things consistent.
Secondly, I applied special color treatments to our reenactment segments of Moses, Pharaoh and of Jesus. These treatments require a blending of multiple special effects filters, applied to create specific “looks” that sets it apart from the main teaching.
The third step is a review pass. I called in John (Producer/Director), Dave and Trevor (Graphics Designers,) and Sara (Project Manager) for a viewing. We watch all 3 hours worth of the lessons and make notes on any of the elements that need tweaking and anything that might be missing from when John last saw the lessons in his edit bay a couple weeks ago.
While I had been finishing and fine tuning the video, Paul (Re-Recording Mixer) had been giving the same attention to the audio – integrating the outstanding scores created by our in-house composer, Eric. After all of this I needed to make a fourth pass to integrate the notes from the peer review, integrate Paul’s audio and finally set everything to render.
Finally, it was time to show the client. We showed the program in our theater on the big screen. It was great to feel the collective emotion of the audience who has worked so hard on such a large project for over two years. It is a very powerful experience to behold, and indeed the best part of my job.
