Anhui Orange taps Blackmagic for Douyu Carnival streaming
Details
Michelle Clancy
| 29 July 2019

Anhui Orange Media in China has completed live grading for Douyu Carnival 2019 with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio and DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel.

Douyu Carnival 2019 is a pan-entertainment cultural festival hosted by China’s streaming giant Douyu. Streaming for the three-day event. The event includes a wide range of elements such as live shows, gaming, film, animation, food and many more, with an highest attendance of more than 410 thousand and 310 million online views; it was filmed using DeckLink 8K Pro, ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K, ATEM 1 M/E Broadcast Panel and HyperDeck Studio Pro.

Anhui Orange Media was tasked with live streaming all the shows was, which was founded in 2014.

“Where this project was distinguished from regular streaming tasks was we needed to live-grade the shows that were being performed on Douyu Stage,” said Zhu Jing, founder of Orange Media. “All performers here were internet celebrities with millions of fans and their fans are more used to how they look in streaming Apps, the intelligent beautification feature of which can give these celebrities a milky white skin tone that their fans love. So Douyu asked us to do the same real time ‘beautification’ work.”

“We tried many live grading solutions, most of which only supported basic primary grading and couldn’t adjust a specific region of the image, such as skin,” Jing added. “Fortunately, DaVinci Resolve could do both primary and secondary grading when used for live grading, just like for post-production . We were allowed to add nodes, qualifiers and even OpenFX for accurate secondary grading. Douyu had attached great importance to the project and they particularly came to Hefei from Wuhan to inspect our Resolve Live grading solution. After a few demonstrations, they immediately confirmed that this was what they asked for.”

Blackmagic Resolve colourist Liu Kang from Chengdu based Kang Studio was asked by Orange Media to help do the skin beautification job. “Before adjusting the skin tone, we had to make sure every camera used at the show could reproduce the real skin colour correctly. From there, we would be able to make a selection of skin. However, the seven cameras of mixed types, including studio cameras, a handheld camera and a drone, were equipped with different lenses and image sensors and the aged studio cameras gave us different looks, though they were the same model and had same settings,” said Liu.

Apart from skin tone, live grading was also used to improve the image quality and enhance the lighting effects.

”All the live grading work was done with the DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel, because it allowed me to get a function at once and to grade the video so subtly that the audience wouldn’t notice. With a mouse, a sudden dramatic change in the live image might happen if the colourist didn’t use it properly when pulling curves which would be a disaster,” said Liu.

A HyperDeck Studio Pro was used to record the graded video for post-production and archival. A good number of Mini Converter UpDownCross were used at the Gaming stage of the event for signal conversion and distribution.