Youngster builds powerful workflows with BLG

One of London’s newest high-end finishing houses, Youngster, is delivering uncompromised quality thanks to FilmLight’s unique BLG workflow. Youngster is using the innovative setup to provide seamless, renderless content exchange between Flame VFX, Avid editing and the Baselight grading and finishing suite. The BLG workflow is already being used on commercials including those for Treatwell and Mulberry as well as music videos for the likes of Joji, whose Sanctuary promo received over 14 million hits on YouTube in its first few days.

Baselight’s core architecture retains the original camera footage throughout the post-production process, capturing all grading and finishing decisions as metadata in the BLG file. The small and portable OpenEXR BLG file is the foundation of the BLG workflow, and can be used to create, review and transfer looks between Baselight, Flame and Avid. This allows any Flame or Avid system that can see the same original footage to recreate the full grade, in real time, simply by exchanging the compact BLG.

Youngster is an autonomous joint venture between world leading edit houses, Whitehouse Post and The Quarry. Established in 2016 it provides high quality finishing services for its parents and for other production companies. Those facilities include VFX and online editing: both Flame suites are equipped with BLG for Flame, and all 20 Avid rooms have the Baselight for Avid plugins, allowing clients to see fully graded material in any room in the facility.

Youngster’s senior colourist Jim Bracher, who originally learned his trade at The Mill and joined in 2018, has worked on commercials, fashion films, music videos, short films and documentaries and with brands including BMW, NBC, Gucci, HP, and The Guardian.

Bracher says, “This workflow means we can develop looks as we go, with VFX artists and editors contributing, rather than putting a final grade on a finished cut. It also means I can say ‘I’ve got time to do this, you do that’ to colleagues, getting the best results from whoever has the availability.

“Couple that with Baselight’s amazing abilities in things like skin clean-ups, using Matchbox shaders, and it gives us a collaborative way to deliver the best results, particularly in the commercials work we do, where we are always under a big time pressure.”

Wolfgang Lempp, CEO of FilmLight said, “The BLG workflow is widely recognised, but Youngster is rare in having everything under one roof. Broadcasters and production companies tend to use Baselight for Avid, commercials houses use BLG for Flame. Here they have complete compatibility between VFX, editing and finishing, which makes for huge efficiency, as well as ensuring the very best final results because everyone is on the same page, all the time.”
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