American Cinematographer - July 2007 - 80

The AIM Dailies Player is built upon the industrystandard Kodak Digital Cinema Server. enamored with the video look after months of editing. With LaserPacific’s film-look emulation applied to those dailies, surprises in the DI stage can be minimized in most cases because the original creative intent has been maintained. In the DI, LaserPacific rescans the selects and applies the CDL to those files, which means the DI starting point is where the preview left off — which included global corrections and primary corrections stored in the CDL. “You’re maximizing time and creativity in the DI suite,” Kennel adds. “We want to be able to build on the color-correction decisions that were made before so we don’t have to start over at each step in the process.” Daryn Okada, ASC enlisted a beta version of AIM during production of the comedy Harold and Kumar 2, as did Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC on Bolden!, a biography of jazz cornet player Buddy Bolden, though the beta versions lacked printer-light control in the AIM Dailies Player. (Zsigmond was scheduled to receive a software upgrade for printerlight control in the Dailies Player before the end of production.) “The dailies had an entirely different feel than any high-definition dailies, truly more filmic,” notes Okada, who would have been saddled with standarddef DVD dailies on a video monitor if he hadn’t selected the beta AIM dailies. “The gamma and everything in the detail from lights to darks were pretty closely represented, not like linear video.” With the ability to see his fullrange HD dailies projected on a 6' screen at 14 foot-lamberts of brightness, Okada noticed proper “tonalities of skin tones that you don’t see when you have other digital-video setups. We got more detail affordably and colors represented accurately. It was a compelling image for people to watch, like back when we could watch film dailies. There are no longer excuses for the images to look any different when they are rescanned for DI or go to film. “The AIM system kept the crews coming back [to view dailies],” he continues, “and also enabled us to become tuned to our jobs without having to second-guess what we were doing. The hair and makeup people could see the response of a certain color on a face. The camera crew could see when a shot was just hanging on to focus so they could feel out the characteristics of the lens. You’d lose all that with any type of standard-video dailies because video resolution is so low that the tolerances are too wide.” At LaserPacific, both Harold and Kumar 2 and Bolden! will undergo preview assemblies with color grading, followed by DI finishes. Simplifying Deliverables with Digital Multi-Masters by Simon Cuff The work involved in making multiple versions and multiple deliverables has made postproduction extremely complex. For historical reasons, the investment priority and apparent raison d’être of post houses has been to focus on editing, visual effects and grading, while the versioning and deliverables side has been viewed as something of an add-on, with a smaller investment in equipment and personnel. However, recent trends in the media market seem to indicate a switch of priorities. It is often the talent for the original post work that first attracts customers to the premises, so it would seem investing in an efficient post-post process could pay dividends. In today’s multi-resolution, multiplatform world, we must ask if the solution to multiple deliverables is a universal digital master at the highest spatial resolution. Technically, this should produce a good, oversampled source for downconverting to make the other deliverables, but achieving good spatial resolution is only a part of today’s mix of requirements. In recent years, the scale of this operation has ballooned, with examples of requirements for more than 60 versions of one production to multiple formats. Quite often this results in the client being charged significantly more for these versions and deliverables than for the original online. The notion of a universal master supposes that the onward operations are linear. That might have been true in the past, but it was always a compromised, one-size-fits-all concept. Now there are some requirements that challenge that notion, and others that dictate an altogether different approach. Good technical quality for all viewing platforms, creative aims, commercial and censorship requirements, and the ever-present desire to make changes right up to the last moment all indicate the need for a new methodology for making deliverables and versioning that uses a far more flexible form of master. The Traditional Universal Digital Master In using a universal digital master, some considerations must be taken into account. The look of images on the screen is part of the creative aim and includes the control of color and grain. The process of grading tends to stretch the contrast and thus increase the appearance of grain. Therefore, the ideal workflow order is linear, in that grain management should be completed before starting the grade. The universal digital master is a suitable solution only if clients are prepared to accept one grade on all deliverables. Today they rarely are. If any of the deliverables are to be encoded or compressed, the resulting image noise or grain can adversely affect the efficiency of the coding. For example, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray encoding all involve 4:2:0 sampling of YCrCb color space at 8-bit resolution. This “pre-compression” also 80 July 2007

American Cinematographer - July 2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - July 2007