JamTV shoots with Blackmagic Design cameras 'Making Their Mark', one of the last Amazon Originals

Making Their Mark, Amazon Original that can be enjoyed through Amazon Prime Video, was filmed by the Melbourne production company JamTV with cameras Blackmagic Design.

The seven-episode series, filmed during 2020, brings viewers closer to six Australian Football League teams by combining images of the matches with images from inside the sports venues, executive rooms and the lives of the players. To capture shots of meetings between the teams and the players and coaches, JamTV Australia used various units URSA Mini Pro 4.6K G2 as main camera.

On the other hand, the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K, also from Blackmagic Design, was used in stabilizers and for filming shots at independent frame rates. In this way, as pointed out Matt Koopmans, director of photography, up to five cameras were used in several games: two fixed, another two in the locker rooms and one for commentary.

JamTV ended up recording more than 2,500 hours y 650TB of audiovisual material in format Blackmagic RAW 8:1, employing more than 20 camera operators from all over the country.

Post-production of Making Their Mark

The specialized company Spark Post Production handled the ingest and low-resolution editing, while Marcus Herrick of Blue Post He was responsible for grading the series. Herrick faced numerous challenges, but the main one was matching the images in Blackmagic RAW with footage recorded during matches: “Fortunately, the dynamic range of the Blackmagic RAW format is very wide and lends itself to compositing, which made it easy to work with grass and skin tones,” says Herrick.

To organize and grade material recorded previously or with other cameras and drones, Herrick turned to color space conversions and group adjustment tools of DaVinci Resolve Studio. "In each shot of the matches, there were a minimum of three masks for the skin tones, the pitch and the control of the brightest parts of the image. In order to convert the latter to HDR format, especially the stadium lights, it was necessary to use a mixture of curves and masks in order to separate the brightest areas and eliminate chromatic contamination, so that they looked good when increasing the brightness to 100 nits. With DaVinci Resolve, I was able to do all this efficiently," adds the correction manager. Herrick color.

SDR and HDR versions

BluePost was responsible for producing Making Their Mark in SDR y HDR, including UHD HDR10, HD HDR10, UHD SDR and HD SDR versions. For this purpose, the company relied on the integration of DaVinci Resolve Studio with Dolby Vision to optimize the conversion from one format to another. The reproduction of the images, on the other hand, was carried out using devices DeckLink o UltraStudio of Blackmagic Design.

The Dolby Vision tools in DaVinci Resolve Studio, as Herrick notes, were a big help: "Being able to grade in HDR and then get an SDR version using Dolby Vision Analysis saved us a lot of time. Plus, making adjustments to the high dynamic range image on one monitor and simultaneously viewing the SDR version on another gives confidence in how both look."