Digital Intermediate
More and more films shot today will never reach the photochemical timing stage. It is, actually, a rare luxury to be provided with film dailies. Most of the time a movie shot on film is scanned right away to a digital medium, only to be returned to film for distribution in its final edited shape. The role of a photochemical timing is replaced by the digital intermediate (DI).
Allen Daviau, ASC
Digital intermediate is the most important development for cinematographers in the past decade because it gives us another avenue of control of all the elements of the picture and we are able to complete the film via digital intermediate as opposed to just doing it in the film lab through the answer print, which we can still do beautifully, entirely in the lab. But digital intermediate is important particularly when we have a film heavily involved in special effects. It helps us to coordinate special effects with regular photography. By being able to adjust contrast, color, saturation, little details of what is sharp and what is not—these are things that just help the cinematographer to really tailor the image to what the concept is. Power windows are sometimes good when you are dealing with the mixing of effects, just to change one element of the picture like the color saturation or the color hue, some little element of control that the digital lets you do.
Some cinematographers are afraid of digital intermediate because they keep running into people in the studios who say no, no, no, we don’t want the cinematographer there, we will do that, we will have the department do the correction. Well, that brings us to the major point: the director or the producer hired you to be a cinematographer because they liked the idea of your vision being with the picture from the very beginning. The conception of the look of the picture is present from the very beginning all the way to the final print. And I think that won’t change and good people want somebody to be there the whole way. And I think that you’ll see that continue. There is always someone who says, “We will take the power away from the cinematographer. Cinematographers have too much power.” Lots of people don’t think that cinematographers have too much power and are delighted that the cinematographers practice this magic that they practice. And digital intermediate is simply another way to make that possible.
You also can conceivably say, being on the set, “If I want physically to take the light off that wall, it will take me an hour and a half or two hours to do it. But let me leave it as it is and I can promise you that I can do it in digital intermediate and we’ll have it done in fifteen minutes.” If you know with confidence what you can do in the digital realm, you can save producers money as long as everybody understands and you are very clear that you are doing it to save a good deal of time and money for the production. So it just gives us another option in terms of the tools that we work with. I think that DI really does not affect the style of lighting that you might do.
Colorist Steven J. Scott, who worked with Allen Daviau in the DI suite on the film Van Helsing, comments on the potential changes that can be introduced in DI.
Steven J. Scott, colorist
When I consider what a talented DP, well-versed in DI, can do with the array of tools at his disposal, one scene that Allen Daviau did on Van Helsing comes to mind. He had three hundred extras in a decommissioned Catholic church in Prague at one o’clock in the morning in freezing cold weather with very little time left to shoot. He wanted to give the scene a realistic, atmospheric period look, as if everything were lit exclusively by candlelight, but was dismayed that the overhead lights made everything look lit from above in a very heavy-handed way. He knew he had two options:
A) Stop everything and take an extra hour to reflag lights, or
B) Use the tools he knew he would inevitably have at his disposal in the DI.
Allen chose the later.
We did little masks around those candles, giving them a romantic glow, and selectively darkened areas that betrayed the actual source lighting, including the ceiling, by using animated mattes. The final shot looked as if light was emanating from the candles inside the church instead of the large lights above. The result was rich, luminous, and natural, just as Allen had planned.
M. David Mullen, ASC
I always found when I was doing a traditional photochemical timing and film print that there was an inherent look to a film stock that you could not drift too far from, whereas in DI you can play so much with the density of the blacks, the coloring in the blacks, midtones, and highlights, and the contrast, that you start to forget what the film stock originally looked like. Occasionally you feel like you have gone too far and then ask the colorist to turn everything off and just look at the original scan again, sans corrections. Sometimes you realize that you and the colorist went overboard with the keying and other electronic tricks and it’s now looking too artificial. For example, digital skin softening: it can be flattering or glamorizing, but it can also be fake-looking. The actors in the scene walk around looking like plastic mannequins because their skin has no detail. You have to be careful about that.
If you are shooting film and know that you will be doing a digital intermediate later, you may be able to save a little time on set. For example, sometimes it may be easier to darken part of a wall in post than to take the time to set a flag. Or if you lost some light on an actor’s face because a cloud came in or the actor missed his mark, or another actor is slightly shadowing him, you often can fix that in DI rather than demand another take.
There are similar issues with color. Let’s say normally you would put half CTO on an HMI for a pale blue moonlight effect outside a nighttime window. But maybe you have too many HMIs outside to quickly put gels on all of them. If you will be doing a DI, you could go with ungelled HMIs and remove some of the excess blue in post while not affecting other parts of the frame. However, it is still better to get the balance correct at the time of shooting, if possible. As soon as a shot gets very complicated, with a lot of movement by the camera or actors, it gets very time-consuming in the DI suite to track the areas you want to isolate and correct separately from other areas. With the high cost of doing a DI, the time allotted for color correction is budgeted very tightly.
Power Window is technically a term specific to DaVinci color correctors, but people often use it generically to describe isolating an area within the frame to correct it separately from the surrounding area. The hardest part, however, is when that area moves during the shot. A lot of the newer color-correcting systems have very good automatic tracking software to follow moving objects so the colorist doesn’t have to do it manually frame by frame. For example, if you want to track an eyeball through the frame as the actor moves, you can mark something prominent like a white glint in the eye and then the software will track that moving glint throughout the shot, as long as it can. That speeds up the process of color correcting using windows. Since eyes are one of the most important things in performance-driven movies, it can be very useful to isolate and correct just the area around the eyes: sometimes I’ve sharpened the eyes of an actor when they were accidentally shot slightly out of focus, or I’ve brightened eyes when there wasn’t enough light on them originally.
The tracking potential of DI emulates the use of filters and image manipulation that resemble chemical processes such as ENR or bleach bypass. ENR is a Technicolor process of retaining silver during the development of a color print. It results in a higher contrast and desaturated colors.
Steven J. Scott, colorist
There are many camera filters that can be emulated in the DI, and in some cases, filtering in the DI may be the better option. An interesting case in point would be a graduated filter. When it is used on the lens as the camera pans or tilts, the filter effect is locked to the lens. The effect can look false as it travels haphazardly across a landscape. With the advanced tracking tools you have at your disposal in the DI, you can lock your graduated filter effect to the tracked landscape, giving you a natural graduated sky effect for even the most complex handheld panning and tra
cking shots.
There are many filters that continue to offer compelling reasons for their use: unique filters that process light in a way that is unachievable in any other way. But using them may result in less flexibility down the line. If you want maximum flexibility in post or the DI, you may want to consider forgoing the use of certain lens filters unless you are absolutely committed to the resulting look. Heavy filtering can’t be undone in the DI. You can emulate an approximation of ENR in the DI, and you can do some things that ENR or bleach bypass can’t, but there are also happy surprises in the traditional ENR and bleach bypass process that you may not be able to emulate completely in the DI. So the question is, do you want to give an emulation of an ENR that is really pretty convincing and have the possibility to, maybe, go half of that ENR, or a quarter of that ENR, or combine this ENR with a bleach bypass or other filter? You can do that in the DI. But if you really want that solid ENR, there really is no substitute for the traditional process.
Caleb Deschanel, ASC
There are various reasons that you go DI. If you shoot super 35 now, you almost have to go through the DI because the optical printers that they had that would blow up 35mm to anamorphic release print are not used anymore. You would have to get them out of mothballs to get it done.
For the most part I don’t find it that much different in the DI. I think it is great if you want to do some really interesting things with color; if you shot something that you haven’t had much control over, then it would help you in that respect. I like finishing on film better, from a point of view that it is very easy to get into a very strange color space once you get into DI. And the other thing is too that the timers in the labs were so good in those days. There are still really great timers, but they are going to disappear as things go along. Another thing that happens when you do the DI is that as you go shot to shot, it is very easy to get lulled into feeling that something is normal and you find yourself going farther and farther off the marks. So you really have to keep tabs on where you are at the beginning. You need still frames to remind you where you are so you don’t start going down the strange path.
It is hard doing a DI to have a global, overall concept of what the film is, because you’re doing it shot to shot. In the old days of timing I used to go in with the timer, and I would look at the work print and in each scene I would say, “This one shot is how warm it should be,” or the whole thing would be too blue, and I would say, “Listen, this is pretty consistent but I really need it to feel more like late afternoon,” or, “It should feel like dawn, much bluer and much darker than it came out in the dailies.” You have a sort of a global idea, and then the timer would take this idea and correct everything to match within the scene and then do the transitions. You are orchestrating it just the way a symphony has different movements; film has visual movements that go from one to the other. It is much easier to keep tabs on when you look at it globally, as opposed to the shot-to-shot approach, which is what happens in the DI.
There are all these people who make the DI who feel like they suddenly become the authors of the movie. That is just wrong. In the old days when it was just on film, it was great. I feel like gradually cinematographers are going to lose everything that they have in terms of how the film looks, and I think that it is one of these things that gives in to all the other egos. Now when you do a film and it goes into the digital editing suite, where they even have color-correcting tools, if the editor has an idea that he wants the scene to be all green or something, and he does it, then they look at it for six months and when you go to time the movie, they are used to seeing it green. They say, “Well, we like it that way now.”
The great thing about film is that film over the last fifty, sixty years, since it has been in color, has evolved basically to be able to represent the human skin tone. It does that better than anything else. In digital there is something cold and just sort of analytical about it. Film actually has a personality in terms of how it represents reality. It smooths things out. People complain that high definition sees all the wrinkles in people. Film doesn’t really do that because it has grain and people look good on film. They don’t necessarily look good on digital, and that is something we have to take under consideration.
Maybe digital needs to evolve the way film evolved. When film evolved, it wasn’t to represent perfect color. Look at Kodachrome versus Ektachrome. You shot a sunset on Kodachrome and it looked different than on Ektachrome. Part of the reason why motion picture film evolved the way it did was that it was designed for movies, for Hollywood movies that represented their own reality. And that reality was more pleasant to the eye than perhaps reality was. If you really think about it, color film was engineered for a purpose.
When lighting for high definition, you have to understand that you don’t have the latitude that you have in film and you have to do testing to find out what the differences are in terms of color. I know that there will be differences in how it responds to different color temperatures.
Janusz Kaminski, cinematographer
The major problem with digital intermediate is that most of the telecine operators are guys that are moving the knobs, and unfortunately they are given the freedom to become participants in the process of what the film looks like. Frequently the cinematographer is not being called to do the DI and the guy who is doing DI has no idea how the film should look. Happily there are some film timers, with photochemical background, who are now doing the DIs. Unfortunately, most of the young guys are from the commercial background, from the music video background, and as a result you have these movies that look uninteresting.
DI is a norm right now. But in DI you can only change density by one and a half or two stops; after that it starts looking electronic. You can put a vignette on a person, and that’s where it is used very beautifully. With a vignette you can make a person darker or bring the blue out, make a person blue. For that purpose the DI is beautiful. You can control secondary colors. You have three actors and one is magenta, one is red, and one is yellow. You can put power windows on each face and you can control the colors that way, rather than putting gels.
Steven J. Scott, colorist
What we have currently in a DI system is a subset of some of the more basic creative tools that exist in the visual effects compositing world. However, more and more DPs who’ve already been exposed to more creative tools are requesting these capabilities within DI. As a result the world of DI is changing very quickly. Having been a compositor, I know that there is a world of exciting, amazing tools that can be brought into the DI to give DPs more creative options. That’s what we’re pushing for, and that’s what’s happening.
The DI environment is increasingly serving as a central fulcrum through which everything passes: a “last stop” before the final product is delivered, be it film, digital cinema, video deliverables, archival copies, or whatever else the future brings. It will also increasingly be the place where everything remains in flux. As things stand now, you do a visual effect and the effect is done. You get a shot where somebody’s blemish has been removed, and that shot is finished and committed. There’s often no option to make adjustments once you get to the DI. What’s happening more and more, however, and what we’ve pioneered, is the ability to make that blemish treatment adjustable in the DI, giving the creatives the option to adjust and finesse it in real time. Eventually we want to give the creatives the option to have their complicated visual effects incorporated and adjustable within the DI as well, so that, let’s say, the background and foreground of an effect can be color-corrected separately. Why is that important? Because the director or the DP wants to have the option to make creative decisions right up until the very last second of the last day before they press the “render” button.
Matthew Libatique, ASC
What happens in the DI is that you have a committee that is judging the look of the film. And if you put a committee of six people to look at an image, about five out of these six people will go for
more contrast in the images. All of a sudden the craft of cinematography becomes an issue of a committee. That is the drawback. It is very easy to create a contrasty image in DI, but it is not that easy to create a low-contrast image in DI. When you never print on film, you never see what the film was supposed to be. So when you scan it, you are scanning the maximum latitude for this negative. But you are chasing the look of the movie because something just doesn’t look correct. I came from photochemical finishing. Everybody who came from photochemical finishing and is now moving to the DI is looking at his film, thinking, “What is wrong with the film? It doesn’t look like a film anymore.”
Colorists become very important to a cinematographer. The relationship you have with that person becomes as important as the one you had with the dailies timer and your finishing timer in the lab. Those were the trusted friends. Post people are becoming just as important in terms of relationship as your operator and your gaffer. Because if you don’t have a good relationship with your colorist and your editor, they are not going to respect the things that you went through to make the choices that you made. You know the colorists because you sit in the DI room with them for two weeks and get to know them day in and day out. They know what you like to eat, they know how you like your coffee, because you spend time with them.
Film Lighting Page 15