House of Cards Season 5

[Aris_Gavriilidis]

I just started watching the 5th season of House of Cards, and one of the first things I noticed is that the overall color is slightly different, especially the skintones, they look better than in previous seasons. Have they switched from Epic Dragon to another camera? Perhaps Weapon Dragon or Alexa (though I think that's unlikely given Netflix doesn't consider upscaled 4K real 4K)? Or is it just a new grade, does anyone know?

Thanks!

 

[Christoffer Glans]

I just started watching the 5th season of House of Cards, and one of the first things I noticed is that the overall color is slightly different, especially the skintones, they look better than in previous seasons. Have they switched from Epic Dragon to another camera? Perhaps Weapon Dragon or Alexa (though I think that's unlikely given Netflix doesn't consider upscaled 4K real 4K)? Or is it just a new grade, does anyone know?

Thanks!

As far as I know they shot season 5 on regular Epic Dragons as before. The biggest switch happened when they went from MX to Dragon back in I think between season 1 and 2. Other than that it might just be that they changed grading with IPP2 or managed a better grading workflow.

The thing is that even if they use the same camera it's natural that over the course of five seasons, there are things learned and discovered. This is why I roll my eyes at people complaining on how Red post production is tedious when anyone who's been working with it for a long time will say that it's pretty easy and that you learn the pros and cons and how to improve upon them.

But I could be wrong, I just seem to remember seeing a behind the scenes shot from season 5 with an Epic Dragon, I guess there are people in here who worked on the latest season who could chime in.

 

[Vladimir Cazacu]

In the first scene of the very first episode, you can see the camera settings that they might be using for the interior shots.


Dragon Color - RedGamma4; iso320 - 2500k

 

[Christoffer Glans]

In the first scene of the very first episode, you can see the camera settings that they might be using for the interior shots.


Dragon Color - RedGamma4; iso320 - 2500k

That's just the shooting settings, we don't know if they used IPP2 for the grading though.

 

[Sean Keefe]

There's a photo on RED's instagram from May 30 of David M. Dunlap on set With DSMC1 Epic, it could be from season 4, but the tags mention season 5.

 

[Marc Wielage]

The colorist on the show is still Laura Jans Fazio of Encore/Hollywood, who does both this show as well as Mr. Robot -- both strikingly-different looking shows, but all corrected on Baselight. I would say the look of the shows has more to do with her and the DP's lighting than the choice of cameras.