Sky Comedy uses the URSA Mini Pro 12K to film its first original

The URSA Mini Pro 12K camera Blackmagic Design has been used to film A Short History of Humor, the first original production of the new German channel Sky Comedy.

The German comedian Dieter Nuhr hosts the three episodes of a production that would be translated into Spanish as A little humorous story and that explores a historical review of the comic genre.

The main segments of the format were recorded in 12K resolution, while the model was used for additional interviews and other shots. Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K. The production team decided to design a 12K workflow in order to obtain more information from the pixels to insert visual effects and have the possibility of cropping and reframing shots in editing, in order to deliver the final program in 4K.

Marius Fisher, who led the production of the program, provides more details: "I had the idea that we could put together the series in post-production, since the size of the 12K images allows them to be enlarged without losing details. In addition, it was a faster way to complete the program, which already had tight deadlines. We filmed in 16:9 12K format Blackmagic RAW and when we made a digital enlargement of the recorded material for the first time, the producer, the director and I were surprised by its quality.”

Glasses Zeiss Supreme

The URSA Mini Pro 12K was used with a steadicam and a lens Zeiss Supreme to provide more details to the filming.

Marius tells how a specific focal length helped him achieve the results he hoped for: "We shot most of the material with Zeiss Supreme Prime 21mm lenses and only once with a 35mm version. We used a wide angle, since we were going to crop the images and decide the framing in post-production. On the other hand, social distancing influenced our decisions, since constantly changing lenses could have prevented such distance from being maintained between team members and talent."

Post-production with DaVinci Resolve

Filming took place over two days in a disused power plant in Berlin, while post-production required another 15. Editing, compositing and grading were carried out in DaVinci Resolve Studio.

Despite the large amount of data, Marius found the process of working with the 12K material very simple: "Even during grading, I had the instant playback option activated on the RAW clips, although when I applied effects in Fusion I had to set the cache to the 'smart' option to make processing easier. We were able to select the most appropriate Blackmagic RAW format, which for us was with 5:1 compression, so that our workflow did not become was affected by the transfer speed, which reached a maximum of 390 MB/s.”