Click here to read Part 1. This article originally appeared in Playback‘s Spring 2015 print issue.

For Montreal’s Muse Entertainment, the move to UHD for season two of its science fiction series Helix was driven by production partner Sony Pictures Television. Muse shoots the series on the Sony F55, finishes the HD version of each episode at Technicolor a week ahead of its airdate on Syfy, and will deliver UHD masters of all episodes at season’s end.

The labour and expense of this dual practice must now be factored into budgets. “It will be about 30% more expensive for the post-production process all the way down the line for dailies, coloring and online,” says Evan Tussman, Muse’s VP post-production.

As with past resolution upgrades, the increased clarity of UHD means even greater attention must be paid to sets, costumes, hair and makeup. And what flaws can’t be addressed on set must be cleaned up later.

“Post is more challenging because we have to make sure nothing pops out,” Tussman says. The visual effects for Helix are still created in 2K and then go through an up-res process before being punched into the 4K image to save on the greater time and cost that would be incurred by moving and rendering the larger files.

The increased overall expense of UHD finishing still has many producers on the fence.

“We’re budgeting for 4K for the second and third seasons of a number of series we’re working on,” says Louis Major, VP, Technicolor Creative Services Canada. “Some are doing it and some are not. A couple of series have yet to determine whether they’re going to swing to 4K post.” The shop is projecting finishing 20% of its series projects in UHD this year, up from about 5% in 2014.

Post shops gear up

Technicolor is involved on several international UHD productions. Toronto-based technical operations manager Brian Reid helped start up the Gaumont/Netflix drug-biz drama Narcos on location in Columbia, while Montreal-based colorist Trevor White facilitated dailies in Morocco for the ancient Israel miniseries Red Tent for Sony and Lifetime.

The UHD workflow has meant costly upgrades in terms of monitors, colour correction tools and overall horsepower at post shops.

“We’re always trying to get faster storage that can handle real-time UHD playback as well as faster pipes from the workstations to the storage to be able to do more simultaneous jobs on [a project] and render VFX and final masters faster,” says Tom Burns, Technicolor director of infrastructure. “Every year we add about 30% new capacity and replace 15% to 20% of old stuff.”

Elsewhere, Deluxe Toronto is finishing Between and the locally shooting Syfy space opera The Expanse in HD and UHD.

An episode shot in 4K or above can run up more than 19TB of data, necessitating workflow adjustments. While producers would like post houses to keep all their files online all the time, that quantity of data over the course of a season for multiple shows makes it prohibitive. So material is archived to tape backup during the dailies process and then restored prior to the mastering of each episode.

“It takes hours to move all that data, and that’s with the increased infrastructure and speed on the hardware side,” says Nick Iannelli, Deluxe Toronto’s VP operations. “Our facility is all on a 10GB backbone. We’re moving data as fast as possible on a network connection.”

Jason Dowdeswell, who recently wrapped a contract as VP production operations at Sony Pictures Imageworks in Vancouver, points out that industry investment in 4K capability was driven by stereoscopic 3D feature films. While most films are 2K, stereo films require a separate perspective for both the right and left eye.

“You need to have the bandwidth to process 4K worth of data in real time, whether it’s on a private playback system or a Digital Cinema Package system at a movie theater,” Dowdeswell says. “Stereo forced everybody to open up their bandwidth and reinforce their infrastructure.”

He adds that while “flat” or non-stereo 4K movies are still rare, “Let’s finish this cycle of projects over the next 18 months and you’ll probably see the next cycle all earmarked as 4K.”

Producers’ need to future-proof their content is pressing, and they will have to accept the extra cost as the price of doing business. Distributors aren’t defraying any of those UHD costs, but Netflix’s Edwards argues that producers are otherwise striking more lucrative deals these days due to increased competition among digital outlets.

“So,” he asks, “what do you want to do with that money — pocket it or try to create a better production?”