Atresmedia’s documentary series ‘La penúltima y me voy’, shot with Blackmagic

Proamagna used Blackmagic solutions to shoot the documentary series ‘La penúltima y me voy’, dedicated to Real Betis footballer Joaquín Sánchez and broadcast on Atresplayer (Atresmedia).

Tomás Durán, director of the format, sought an approach for La penúltima y me voy in which the realism and naturalism typical of the documentary style would predominate, but with small elements of drama in order to provide an “elegant and unique” tone, as Iván Puente, Proamagna’s technical coordinator, recalls. This approach and the lighting challenges, led the production company to opt for the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro.

Puente elaborates on the decision: “More often than not, there was rarely time to plan for or use complex lighting setups, which typically meant relying on natural light only. With the locations and lighting conditions constantly changing, the combination of color science and dynamic range made the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro ideal for the job, always capturing bright, crisp tones, even in high contrast situations.”

Juanma Martín, director of photography and cameraman on the project, aimed to squeeze the capabilities of the camera. Among his favorite features was the Blackmagic solution’s dual native ISO setting: “Most of the time we worked at ISO 400 outside and ISO 1,250 indoors, with DaVinci Resolve Studio’s grain corrector applied in post, resulting in a nice cinematic image.” Martin also highlights the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K’s “mix of portability and versatility,” which helped to accommodate the moments leading up to Joaquin’s crucial match.

Post-production of La penúltima y me voy

For post-production, the Proamagna team used a NAS server connected to four editing stations running DaVinci Resolve Studio connected to the network via a 10G Ethernet port. In Puente’s words, “We copied everything across and then ingested the media into a DaVinci Resolve project, organizing and sorting the clips and then using an SQL database to help index everything ahead of the multicam edit and grade.”

The Proamagna team was pleased with this Blackmagic workflow, which spanned from capture to post-production: “This was our first complete video post experience in Davinci Resolve and we were impressed. It proved incredibly stable throughout, despite an intensive and demanding multicamera edit. And the fact we achieved real time playback on camera original media was a huge time saver for us.”