Sanctuary is touted as the first North American series shot entirely with Red One cameras, so it’s no wonder many in the industry want to know more about the show’s production and post pipeline using the revolutionary 4K digital technology.

‘Once we were up and running, I was getting calls from other producers saying, ‘Hey, can we get a copy of your workflow?” recalls Lee Wilson, coproducer and VFX supervisor on the drama airing on The Movie Network, Movie Central and Sci-Fi Channel.

Wilson is also president and co-owner of Vancouver’s Anthem Visual Effects, which provides online editing and VFX for the fantasy TV series, currently prepping for season two.

The footage is initially captured on Red One hard drives in the Vancouver studio. (The production started shooting with Red One Build 14, graduating by the end of season one to Build 16.) The material is then backed up, and proxy versions are created for the offline editing team, consisting of Stein Myhrstad, Gordon Rempel and Eric Hill.

The drives containing the footage – recorded in the Redcode Raw .r3d file format – then go to Anthem for quality control before the studio’s artists work on the effects, which number a staggering 200 to 400 per episode. Once the offline edit is presented to Anthem, the shop has all the media on hand for conforming. The workflow remains tapeless until the show is delivered on HDCAM SR.

Wilson was among those who championed Red for Sanctuary, in part because Anthem is a Mac OS X-based shop equipped with Final Cut Pro, with which the camera was tailor-made to work. Avid systems also work with Red, but FCP is far more economical.

‘I could have that many more artists and that many more seats of work going on [using FCP], rather than buying a seat of software that was considerably more expensive,’ Wilson says. ‘You’ll get the people who will look down their noses at [FCP] and say, ‘Oh, it’s kind of a toy.’ Well, not really – there are people who are cutting features on it.’

Nonetheless, the big post houses want to make sure they can accommodate whatever workflow a project prefers. Technicolor Vancouver, for one, is geared up to work also with Avid-based projects shooting Red, which it has done on the series Supernatural and Reaper, both of which air on The CW.

‘There are lots of legacy Avid [systems] in the market,’ notes Stephen Goetz, director of technical operations at Technicolor Vancouver. ‘People still want to work with tape-based systems. We’re developing workflows so that people can still use existing equipment without having to invest in Final Cut Pro and all this added storage.’

The shows shoot primarily with digital Arriflex D-21 cameras (which record to Sony SR tape) and have also incorporated Red material for Steadicam shots (due to the Red One cameras’ easy mobility). The challenge, then, is to effectively marry the material shot on the two different cameras for seamless dailies and editorial.

To that end, Technicolor Vancouver established a series of custom lookup tables (LUTs) for the DOP to access during shooting that indicate the colors and intensity values with which the image would be displayed on a Cine-tal monitor. The LUTs are noted on the camera report and applied to dailies back at Technicolor.

The post shop also uses Assimilate’s software-based Scratch system for managing the look of the Red material. It provides footage for the offline editors in the Avid DNxHD 36 format for Supernatural and Avid Meridien 14:1 media for Reaper.

Jeremy Munce, editor on Bruce McDonald’s recently released zombie flick Pontypool, sees working with Red a ‘total breeze,’ provided data management is under control. He points out that the original files are so big they would crash the kind of workstations currently available, which was a situation he encountered on the U.K./Canada feature Spiderhole.

‘If the online company that you’re finishing with is not in communication with whoever’s handling it on set, that’s when you just run into problems,’ Munce says.

On Pontypool, finishing was done at Deluxe Postproduction, while Erik Greensmith served as the onset digital management technician. Related Toronto post shops Fini Films and RedLab, the latter a digital workflow specialist, also played key roles.

RedLab would take the .r3d files and, overnight, process Apple ProRes files for Munce to edit. The down-converted files were far smaller than the originals, but still enabled the editor, who worked at Theatre D Digital’s location at The Royal cinema, to work with an HD-quality image.

‘I was able to patch out of the back of my Mac Pro right into the Christie projector, and so we were watching our rough cut in beautiful resolution,’ Munce notes.

A cartoon by artist John Coburn, who visited the set, shows Greensmith sweating over the Red One, which speaks to the trepidation about shooting on digital systems that remains the norm in these nascent days.

‘It’s just data – people get scared of that,’ Munce says. ‘I’ve heard some horror stories – not around the Red camera, but around digital shooting to cards, shooting to data, where some hard drive gets whacked or a card malfunctions and a [lot of] shooting is gone. It’s not the same as putting light to negative.’