The digital intermediate process for the RED-shot feature Standing Ovation took place at Local Hero Post in Santa Monica.

"A feature filled with song and dance numbers performed by enthusiastic young actors screams for eye-popping visuals," says Leandro Marini, company founder and DI producer at Local Hero Post. "The RED camera came through with richly saturated imagery and we were able to push the colors and details to the max doing the color grade in Scratch."

"Scream" from Standing Ovation
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"Assimilate Scratch easily ingests and handles the native RED RAW data—no proxies, no transcoding—and the conform goes very quickly," says Marini. "Every project has its unplanned challenges, but with Scratch, we were able to work past those and focus on the primary and secondary color grading, tracking masks, keying and enhancing details."

Writer/director Stewart Raffill and executive producer James Brolin personally supervised the DI sessions—the color grading and finishing—in the Scratch theater. "We were grading and making changes in real time, of course, and both Raffill and Brolin were impressed with what can be done today using digital cinema tools," says Marini. "I think it's safe to say that they were both blown away with the color grading and finishing process, the ability to easily compare/contrast different versions, and then make changes on the fly."

"Blush" from Standing Ovation
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Marini adds, "Raffill loves film and this is his first digitally shot feature. He was truly thrilled, after thinking digital footage could never look this good. That's extremely satisfying for us as well, to know a client is downright happy with our work."

Marini was an early adopter of the Scratch data workflow and has used it to post several features, commercials and imagery projects shot in a variety of formats. "Scratch has evolved over the years to become a highly efficient and stable data workflow with powerful digital post tools," says Marini. "The ongoing updates keep it state of the art. It will support any format, but it is a dream for RED 4K and RED MX. For us, working in Scratch is almost a magical experience—we have all the needed DI tools at our fingertips to bring out the best in imagery, no matter the format or size of the project."