A Taste of Marley

January 10th 2019  
“A Taste of Marley” was one of the most ambitious documentary web series we have worked on. The post-production spanned many months of continuous work and covered many topics. With so much fantastic footage and information to play with, arriving at a clear and concise topic for each episode could prove to be a challenge. In the end, though, the editorial team managed to get 10 great episodes out of it.
 
The series follows Roham Marley across his home country of Jamaica as he shares his local culture in both food and music. Each episode is centered around one or two main locations and in true documentary form, little to nothing is scripted. As such, the production had many different acquisition devices so that they could easily capture everything in the moment without missing a beat.

Our main challenge in post was to conform and match all the various sources, aspect ratios, and frame-rates. In addition, we had archival footage and footage from non-professional sources to incorporate. With such a wide variety of cameras, color profiles, and gamma curves to work with, having one base look to paste across the series simply would not work. We had to find a quick and simple way to unify all the technical elements of all the source footages in order to fit within extremely limited time constraints for the grading.

Like we do in most of our series workflows, we started ingesting the sequences in Flame where we identified all the sources we had and started creating color space offsets for each. We settled on an Alexa Log-C color space as it was the least destructive option to convert to when taking into account all the source material. 

Once the conform was done, we exported DPX image sequences to our shared network servers to the color suites. With some exceptions, most of the footage was converted to Log-C and this made the sharing of looks between cameras much simpler. Some little adjustments needed to be made here and there but the base transform LUTs we started with carried us through all the episodes. 

“A Taste of Marley” is premiering on various streaming platforms this spring!