Digital intermediates: solving the dilemma of color management

Post, July, 2005 by Claudia Kienzle

The digital intermediate (DI)--electronic finishing of film material for theatrical release--is not only changing the workflow within the post facility, it's changing the way the industry works.

While it's been commonplace for movie studios to farm out portions of a feature to different facilities--for such tasks as dailies, feature marketing materials or feature mastering--when it comes to the DI, they're now inclined to find a single facility that can handle everything from start to finish.

Once the film look is established in the DI session, that same look can be applied to all related marketing collateral and deliverables, including digital cinema, HDTV and DVDs. But DI experts say the real challenge is color management as images move from the film color space to the video color space and back to film, as well as applying that color to all of the digital versions they generate.

THE ENTIRE WORKFLOW

"Studios are beginning to recognize that having a single, trusted vendor producing all their deliverables offers the ability to maintain color consistency in every version, it secures high-resolution movie data from piracy and it eliminates redundant efforts that speed up time to market," says Robert Solomon, president of Ascent Media Creative Services (www.ascentmedia.com) in Santa Monica.

"Our business plan is to support the entire DI workflow, including film scanning, digital conforming, color grading and film recording. And since we're already handling the film's high-resolution image files and doing the color correction, there are cost efficiencies for us to also provide dailies support and produce all deliverables, including trailers, TV spots and post theatrical distribution elements," says Solomon.

While the DI process gives filmmakers greater creative latitude over their films, Solomon says the need to make last-minute changes can be very stressful for the DI facility because even small changes can have a ripple effect on all the digital conform and color management that's already been done. "I've seen instances where an audience screening or MPAA review caused the need to add, cut or edit many scenes throughout the movie," says Solomon. "The challenge there is to make certain the look, colors and continuity are all preserved and executed even though, at that point, you're working under very tight deadlines."

LOOKING AT 4K COLOR

The DI work for the movies Constantine and The Amityville Horror was completed at Ascent's Santa Monica-based Company 3 (www.company3.com), which has a New York iteration as well.

Stefan Sonnenfeld, president, managing director and colorist for Company 3, completed the DI work for The Amityville Horror and his Company 3 colleague colorist David Hussey completed the DI work for Constantine.

According to Sonnenfeld, "Color management is not as tricky as it once was. We're now confident that we can interchange between images from the film and video color spaces with consistent results. This is because we spent many months finessing our LUTs with the help of Filmlight's CubeBuilder, a tool that enables users to create, augment and customize their LUTs to support whatever they need to do."

Company 3 also uses FilmLight's TrueLight for color management. And, for color correction, Company 3 currently uses the da Vinci 2K. But, Sonnenfeld has been testing the top 4K color correction systems on the market, including Discreet Lustre and da Vinci's Resolve, in the hopes of upgrading to 4K in the near future.

Company 3 recently completed DI work on the trailers for War of the Worlds. And Sonnenfeld has also been working with director Michael Bay on the DI of The Island, a feature film coming this month from DreamWorks. (The two worked together on the DI for Bad Boys 2 as well.)

"On The Island, we've been able to be very creative and progressive with the colors because there are many diverse venues, set-ups and moods, including dream sequences, futuristic settings, underground bunkers, CG worlds and even car chases," says Sonnenfeld. "The DI process is great for Michael because he is driven to push the envelope to achieve amazing new looks."

Ascent is very dedicated to this market segment: its Encore Video will be opening a new DI division in the next few months, and its London studios Soho Images and One Post also offer DI services.

CONVEYING EMOTION WITH COLOR

"Our approach is to find the mid-point of the film negative, then scan all the color information--in 10-bit log DPX-format files--from the film. While many facilities throw color information away during telecine transfer, we capture colors at the thickest point of the negative so that we can go to either side of the reds, greens or blues with greater creative latitude," says Craig Mumma, co-owner (along with Marc Kolbe) of The Digital Intermediate Group (www.digroupusa.com) in Culver City, CA.

"Sometimes DPs are startled when we first bring up the scan on our monitors because they are expecting to see pristine, color perfect scans like they originally envisioned. Instead, we are giving them all the color information that could be captured from their film, and then we work with them to adjust the colors to match their original vision, and often, going beyond," Mumma adds.