Quantel Pablo takes on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Newbury, United Kingdom – Hollywood post house Light Iron carried out the 4K DI for David Fincher's 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' with its two Quantel Pablo color correction systems. 'Dragon Tattoo' is among the largest 4K movies ever delivered. At 2 hours and 38 minutes, the final DI consists of almost 250,000 frames of 45 megabytes each. Ian Vertovec, Senior Colorist and Founder at Light Iron, relied on Pablo for all of the color correction and most of the conform process. Vertovec said, "Pablo has supported 4K for a long time, but what is interesting is that 'Dragon Tattoo' is 4K plus and the Pablo was challenged to perform outside of its comfort zone. It did so without a problem." According to Vertovec, Fincher's latest project was both a creative and technical challenge that only the Pablo could tackle. In preparation for supervised sessions, he graded and pre-rendered all the footage and then video-recorded Fincher's audio and laser-pointer guided notes. Once the director had completed his review and left the facility, Vertovec loaded the video into the Pablo. "As a result, I had my screen reference with his laser pointer and I'd split that with the DI. I'd drop his audio in and have that in with the temp audio and then I would play through the scenes with every note he gave me," said Vertovec. "That kind of structure is what we want to implement to make solid use of his time." Michael Cioni, Light Iron CEO and Founder, summed it up, "We had all our Pablos running in 4K both day and night during the time 'Dragon Tattoo' was in house - basically the equivalent of 8K playback - all without dropping a single frame."