Avatar: The Way of Water

James Cameron and his team leveraged Evercast to help bring Pandora back to the big screen.

“We could actually jump on each other’s Avids regardless of whether we were here or in New Zealand; we could communicate through softwares like Evercast. It gave us the ability to jump in and review sequences together.”‍

- Stephen E. Rivkin, ACE, editor

The project

Avatar: The Way of Water is the highly-acclaimed sequel to the 2009 film Avatar, directed by James Cameron. It continues the epic set in the visually stunning world of Pandora, exploring new environments and delving deeper into the conflict between humans and the indigenous Na'vi people.

The team

• James Cameron, director, producer, writer, editor
• Jon Landau, producer
• David Brenner, editor
• John Refoua, editor
• Stephen E. Rivkin, editor
• WetaFX, visual effects
• ILM, visual effects
• Barnstorm, visual effects (compositing)
• Jenna Udy, post-production producer

Unique challenges

An enormous global crew

3,800 people comprised the Avatar crew. The post-production team worked together remotely, primarily from Wellington, New Zealand or Los Angeles, leveraging technology to stay connected and cohesive. It was especially important to the team that any tech solutions they introduced did not interfere with James Cameron’s established workflows.

Multiple, long phases of editorial

It’s no secret, with twelve years in the making, that producing Avatar: The Way of Water was no simple feat. Post-production, like just about everything else on this project, was highly complex. The actors were filmed on an empty studio stage using reference cameras, which meant that the first phase of editorial was to choose the best performances from each actor, not the best shots—a long process in and of itself.

Next, the editors worked together to actually create the shots themselves, or dailies, using a virtual camera to manipulate lighting, movement, everything that would normally be done when capturing performances in a traditional live action film. Only in the next phase did the process begin to resemble a conventional edit, when the editorial team assembled all of the shots in order to hand them over to WetaFX to build out the world. 

Characters, characters, and more characters

Not only was there an abundance of characters in the film (far more even than in the original Avatar), but combining live action with virtual characters also complicated the process exponentially. During production, there were 16 camera operators, each camera assigned to a different character.

In the initial performance edit, the editors were tasked with accounting for every character, among many different takes, and making sure that they related to each other with similar timing as the original native take. Additionally, they had to juggle a combination of humanoid characters (performed by humans) as well as creatures (100% keyframe-animated).

All of that, but underwater…

This is The Way of Water, after all. As if it weren’t elaborate enough to have 16 cameras capturing each actor, they also shot through windows on the water tank to capture references of the motion. Editing the various forms of underwater reference footage was brand new to Avatar: The Way of Water, and added a very challenging additional layer for the entire crew.

Crucial organization and preparation

The 20+ assistant editors on the team had their work cut out for them: organizing and preparing the first batch of reference cameras, followed by prepping the virtual production edit for the lab in an intricate turnover process, involving vetting every piece of motion and face and accounting for each in count sheets. Tight communication was essential.

The setup

Before the team started using Evercast, collaboration was a challenge. Their initial setup involved Cameron pointing an HD camera at a large projector screen inside his screening room, which displayed a full-screen output of his Avid.

He then streamed the camera footage into Bluejeans for his production team to watch over video chat. However, Bluejeans is not made for production, and watching a screen by way of a webcam was certainly not ideal. With this setup, they not only lacked the stream quality and low-latency for professional review, but they also couldn’t accurately determine which frame Cameron was on as he paused or scrubbed through the Avid timeline.

Once they started to use Evercast, the solution was to split Cameron’s left monitor, which was typically used to display his Avid timeline, using a 4K HDMI splitter. The second HDMI coming out of the splitter then plugged into an USB 3 HDMI input capture device by AJA. This allowed Evercast to capture a mirror of Cameron’s left monitor display. The AJA HDMI capture device then plugged into a laptop beside his desktop computer, which was running EvercastEvercast Broadcaster Software (EBS).

The workflow

With Cameron in Wellington, New Zealand and most of the post team in Los Angeles, they leveraged Evercast to streamline and work efficiently—without interrupting their established workflow. Using Evercast’s cropping feature, the team was able to crop around the timecode/frame preview of Avid and the video monitor. Then, they were able to make the video output full-screen and overlay Avid’s timecode/frame preview onto the full-screen video.

Now, instead of the production team having to watch a stodgy stream through Bluejeans, they could focus on the direct stream from Evercast, which included both the high-resolution output of the Avid content and the Avid timecode/frame overlay. Ultimately, this setup was used on all of Cameron’s Avid editing systems globally, as well as his editors’ individual systems.

The results

Evercast served as one central hub for an enormous global creative team as they navigated challenging workflows with unique technical processes across editorial, visual effects, and more. It integrated seamlessly with their existing tools and processes, enabling them to communicate and make changes together in real time—without breaking their flow.

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