SGO’s Mistika DI Colour Grading post systems were again used at Park Road Post Production for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second in the trilogy directed by Peter Jackson.
Mistika’s involvement at Park Road included supporting on-set services and screening HFR digital dailies, to the DI online, stereoscopic work and final grade for the film. Park Road’s facility features purpose-built DI theatres for both 2D and stereoscopic finishing work, supported by Mistika 4K/Stereoscopic master systems, with finishing suites with matching SFGO technology.
“Park Road choose tools which are not only scalable and technically deep, but have truly focussed on using those tools as enablers for creative expression. With the Mistika we were able to work interactively with the production, at high frame rate, taking the unique looks developed for the second film and extending them in the final grade sessions to focus on visual narrative,” said Trish Cahill, supervising digital colourist for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. “The best thing about great tools is they enable us to work with filmmakers to bring the world they imagined to life.”
It took Park Road Post Production and SGO years of research, development, testing and refinement to create the workflow for The Hobbit trilogy. Workflow architect Anthony Pratt helped develop Park Road Digital Cinema, VFX and 3D workflows and is part of the lead team that designed the HFR-3D workflow.
Head of technology at Park Road Phil Oatley, commented: “We rely on the capability of SGO’s Mistika when creating stunning content for all our clients. Once again, on a ground-breaking production of this magnitude, Mistika has provided a proven and reliable architecture that was both flexible and robust, giving us the immense speed we required. It is a huge advantage to work on one unified platform, and the Mistika combines immense power with remarkable versatility.”
The film crossed the $500 million mark at the box office in its first two weeks of release. The film opened on 11 December 2013, and is currently showing in cinemas in HFR 3D, IMAX 3D and 2D.
