For The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher reunited the post team from The Social Network: Academy Award-winning Editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, Light Iron Colorist Ian Vertovec, Assistant Editor Alex Olivares, Post-Production Supervisor Peter Mavromates, and Assistant Editor Tyler Nelson. The team refined the workflow from The Social Network for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, upgrading from a 2K post workflow to a 4.5K and 5K pipeline resulting in a 4K digital master. Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium, including Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro software, was instrumental in the post-production process.
“As a team, we continue to refine our workflow on each movie,” says Nelson. “On both projects, Adobe video products stood up to the demands of conforming the films, handling huge files, and helping us fine-tune shots and sequences.”
Nelson notes that After Effects proved to be a great conform tool, but it also offered horsepower for VFX compositing. “Adobe After Effects gave us the ability to do many of our visual effects in-house,” says Nelson. “For instance, we were able to complete subtle split screens to adjust the timing of a performance or to retain continuity throughout a scene if more than one take was used-for example if a glass of water is half full in one shot and three-quarters full in another.”
Throughout the process, the small, multi-faceted team took advantage of Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium to reduce costs while producing professional results. The team used Adobe Premiere Pro for real-time previews of how scenes and shots were coming together. They also seamlessly imported sequences from Final Cut Pro into Adobe Premiere Pro software. Then, through Dynamic Link, a tool that eliminates intermediate rendering between components of Production Premium, the sequence was sent to After Effects-without having to render the shots first.
For details of how Fincher’s post-production team used Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium software, see this PDF document.