OmniScope Featured Artist:
L.A. based colorist Tashi Trieu is a veteran finishing artist and colorist who has worked on some of the biggest titles in the industry, including Alita: Battle Angel, Stranger Things, Ford vs. Ferrari and numerous Marvel films. Known for combining deep technical knowledge with artistic sensibilities, Tashi was selected by James Cameron and Lightstorm Entertainment to be the DI colorist on Avatar: The Way of Water.
Time in Pixels was thrilled to recently chat with Tashi about Avatar and learn why Nobe OmniScope is an essential tool in his color grading process.
COURTESY OF 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS
Avatar is one of the top-grossing films of all time – famously reviving the world’s interest in stereo 3D film with jaw dropping visuals. To prepare for the long anticipated sequel, Tashi was first tapped to remaster the original Avatar film for a 48fps, stereo 3D theatrical re-release. Working out of Park Road Post in Wellington, New Zealand the finishing team then moved on to The Way of Water for grading and final post. To prepare for the film’s for worldwide delivery, the team ultimately delivered 11 discrete versions optimized for various theatrical projection formats.
“Working previously on Alita was, in some ways, a dress rehearsal for Avatar: The Way of Water. Many of the crew, stereo camera technology, and workflows were shared between the films. It was a great opportunity to learn how to orchestrate a complex DI with a dozen different simultaneous deliverables. Tashi continues, ”My past experiences in workflow, editorial, and color science in addition to color grading made me an ideal candidate for a project like Avatar, which throws every challenge at you.”
For color grading and finishing, Tashi used Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve running on Linux on a SuperMicro workstation running (4) Nvidia A6000 GPU cards. Storage was a Quantum StorNext File System and Quantum disk array connected via fiber channel. And for the primary grading cinema, projection was handled by dual DolbyVision Christie Eclipse E3LH projectors.
Tashi’s OmniScope setup at Park Road Post.
For scope setup, the team relied on Nobe OmniScope running on a HP Z840 with a Blackmagic Design Decklink 8K Pro to handle the 48 fps signal format.
OmniScope’s Source Signal and Histogram qualifiers were great for isolating just the blues of the Na’vi skin, so it was easy to maintain continuity between complex shots with a lot of background.
COURTESY OF 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS
According to Tashi, “There are a lot of hardware scope solutions out there. But I really like that OmniScope is modular, easy to configure, and always improving. I replaced an aging OmniTek with OmniScope. There are a lot of great hardware scopes out there, but they lack flexibility, and chiefly the upgradability that comes with a software-based scope.”
When asked about working with Time in Pixels and submitting specific feature requests, Tashi offers positive endorsement. “Tom Huczek (founder of Time in Pixels) is one of the rare software developers out there who has built a great personal rapport with customers in the color correction community. Tom is so responsive to my requests that none of them linger very long. Stuff that I’d normally expect to wait a lengthy development cycle sometimes comes within days of my request, or was already there and I just didn’t know where to look. Tom gets it!”
Released at the end of 2022, Avatar: The Way of the Water was a huge commercial and critical success, grossing over $2.3 billion at the global box office, collecting four Academy Award nominations and a win for Best Visual Effects. On the overall experience Tashi states, “Avatar is an incredibly rich and rewarding franchise to be creatively involved with. I think a lot of people were skeptical if a second Avatar could amaze them the way the first did. But once again, Jim showed the world something they had never seen before, fulfilling both a technological promise thirteen years in the making, as well as a creative one in a new underwater world with new characters and things we hadn’t seen before. I trust the next movie, and the movie after that, will similarly blow us all out of the water.
If you’d like to learn more about the technical challenges surrounding the color and finishing of Avatar: The Way of Water, please visit this interview on MixingLight.com.
Portions of this story have been transcribed with permission from an in-depth interview published on February 15, 2023.
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