MEXICO CITY—As a post producer at Caffeine, a global creative postproduction studio with a presence in Mexico City, Los Angeles and New York, my team and I work on projects for some of the world’s leading content providers and streaming platforms, as well as many independent films from Latin America and the United States.
Caffeine was co-founded by CEO Adrián Geyer, and we offer editorial, color grading, VFX, motion graphics, sound design and finishing for a diverse clientele. At the heart of our post workflow is DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic Cloud.
Matching the Dark Scale of the Narrative
Recently, I worked on “Aquí hay dragones” (“Here Be Dragons”), a dystopian, preapocalyptic feature film directed by Iria Gómez Concheiro. Set in Mexico, the film is wrapped in a dark and tense atmosphere of totalitarian government and social betrayal. At the center of the story is a strong female character whose journey drives much of the film’s emotional and narrative force. What fascinated me about this project was the immense challenge of bringing such a dark, visually ambitious and complex world to life, requiring a postproduction infrastructure capable of matching the scale of its narrative.
As the online and digital intermediate editor, I was the technical and creative bridge, keeping fluid communication across all the departments at Caffeine. My main responsibility was ensuring that the media conformed perfectly and that the transitions between editing, VFX and color grading in DaVinci Resolve Studio were completely seamless.
The main challenge in post was connecting our head colorist, working remotely, with two of our in-house colorists and me. To achieve this, we deployed a dedicated point-to-point network for high-speed media transfer and collaborative remote workflow with Blackmagic Cloud.
This workflow is used exclusively for independent projects; projects for streaming platforms follow their own required security protocols and workflows. Using path-mapping mirroring, our media was automatically synchronized across locations the exact moment it was ingested into the project. This allowed our remote head colorist to conduct real-time remote grading sessions on DaVinci Resolve Studio with the DP, who was sitting in our grading theater at Caffeine. This allowed the DP to see the live changes at maximum quality and with no perceptible latency while the colorists worked.
Simultaneously, I was able to handle conform and intermediate finishing tasks natively. This unified ecosystem meant we could manage late editorial updates, handle finishing fixes and fine-tune color without bottlenecks.
Agility, Security and Speed
The overriding benefit of our workflow was unmatched agility, security and collaborative speed. In traditional workflows, remote color-grading and multidepartment collaboration often results in downtime, massive storage duplication and constant file rendering. With DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic Cloud, nobody ever had to stop operations. Our local and remote team worked as if they were in the same room, drastically reducing delivery times while maintaining the highest creative standards.
Tools such as Offline Reference and Viewer Background were lifesavers, allowing us to quickly check alignment and detect any accidental blanking issues in the frame. On the finishing side, the Compare With Current Timeline feature was indispensable, as I was able to spot changes instantly and conform the new scenes without disrupting the ongoing color work.
On the online and finishing sides, the sheer versatility of DaVinci Resolve Studio allowed me to perform essential cleanup tasks directly within the Fusion page using tools like Paint and Patch Replacer. Handling these fixes within my linear timeline streamlined our finishing dynamics, eliminating the need to generate external plates for a separate VFX department and significantly reduced machine downtime and rendering overhead.
Generally, managing a nonlinear, multi-location workflow under tight deadlines without halting operations is a challenge, but thanks to Blackmagic Cloud’s real-time synchronization and DaVinci Resolve Studio’s all-in-one architecture, we accommodated late editorial adjustments seamlessly. We resolved complex VFX cleanups, screen inserts and remote color grading on the fly, transforming what is usually a stressful bottleneck into a smooth, everyday routine at Caffeine.
More information is available on Blackmagic Design’s website.
