The virtual reality film 'Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR', post-produced with DaVinci Resolve and Fusion Studio

DaVinci Resolve and Fusion Studio Blackmagic Design were the two key post-production softwares of Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR, an experience based on virtual reality.

The virtual reality movie Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR, which includes two parts, premiered on March 3 and tells the story of the Californian during solo climbs on two continents, documenting experiences in some of the most remote and wild places on the planet. The feature film, Jonathan Griffith Productions, is available in the application Oculus TV of virtual reality glasses Meta Quest.

After his successful feature film Everest VR, Griffith considered that the next step could be to make a piece about solo climbs. Once he convinced Honnold, began technical planning without preferences to capture the adventure in the most realistic way possible without having to use a very large team or too many devices. This is how he himself tells it Griffith: "We had to shoot a 360-degree panoramic image around the subject, so the camera had to be hung from the cliff as far away as possible. Our style of production doesn't have big support systems; it's just me with what I can carry. So I also had to climb the mountain and set up everything myself. It was quite a challenge."

Griffith used a virtual reality camera with eight lenses designed to capture a view of 360 degrees, which generated eight clips with a resolution of 3840 x 2880. These angles were then joined together in order to create a completely 360 degree stereoscopic.

Post-producing a piece in VR

The editor Matt DeJohn employment DaVinci Resolve Studio to assemble Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR. Using the functions of the software Blackmagic, created a timeline at 7680 x 7680 resolution, with the added complexity of left and right eyes in portrait and landscape orientation. Once everything was set up, including spatial audio synchronization and microphone tracks, it gave start of the editing process.

A key to the format's success, according to DeJohn, was having the ability to access Fusion from the Editing module of DaVinci Resolve Studio: "Orientation is very important in VR, and sometimes needs to be adjusted shot by shot. The main goal is to position the subject in front of where the viewer is likely to be looking. For example, in shot A, if a character in front of the viewer walks 90 degrees to the right, the subject in shot B should be positioned at the same point, 90 degrees from the center, also to the right. This orientation adjustment was done with a Fusion template I created, which I could access from the Edit module in Resolve. It worked as a custom plugin.”

For DeJohn, the flexibility of DaVinci Resolve Studio greatly simplified the complex workflow: "It was ideal to work primarily in DaVinci Resolve, because it minimized the number of times the material was delivered. This program offers a wide variety of tools in different disciplines: editing, compositing, visual effects, grading and sound. It was possible to make editing adjustments while the color correction was being carried out. I would never have been able to do that in an older application. I was still polishing cuts, arranging effects visuals, changing the virtual reality images and working on the conversion to stereoscopic format while other artists processed other areas, all on the same timeline.”

Going deeper into Fusion Studio

Fusion Studio It was the piece of gear that made it possible to facilitate the complex process of uniting the images from the eight cameras. James Donald y Keith Kolod, visual effects artists specialized in post-production virtual reality, processed the base and then exported the elements to Fusion Studio to polish the material and work it in stereoscopic format. “First, I fixed stereo vertical mismatches and sound depth issues by using grid warps and mismatch alignment tools,” Kolod recalls.

Donald also values ​​the Fusion Studio stereoscopic functionality: "Fusion tools combined with VR tools offer an important set of features that are more stable and reliable than other options, not to mention excellent value for money for independent artists. In particular, I relied a lot on the integration with the Oculus VR headset to preview images in real time by manipulating parametric curves and masks in stereoscopic format, as well as fine-tuning the alignment of both eyes."

The Blackmagic Design tool was also key to remove items that could spoil the viewer's viewing experience: "Using a paint node, I eliminated tripods and cables, and then converted the work from one eye to the other, to match the natural stereoscopic format in the area. Next, I decreased any extreme depth that existed at the zenith and nadir, which can cause significant discomfort to the spectacled viewer. Next, I applied more traditional rotoscoping techniques and cleaned up the base images around any subject that crossed the joints of the material in 360 degrees,” Kolod recalls.

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