Chasing Down the Price of a 2K DI

illustration by QuickHoney

Director/editor Kyle Dean Jackson and producer Alan Pao have thoroughly debunked the idea of digital intermediate finishing as an expensive black art. Their film Chasing Ghosts went through a 2K DI using only the Mac platform. Offering a $50,000 savings over other 2K solutions, the workflow Pao and Jackson describe offers a new DI entry point for indie filmmakers who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.
Co-written by Pao and Jackson and starring Michael Madsen, Shannyn Sossamon and Michael Rooker, the film was lensed in 35mm by DP Andrew Huebscher on Los Angeles locations in just 24 days. But from pre-production to post, Chasing Ghosts was a 14-month project. The team spent more than six months testing the DI pipeline, then took about seven weeks to complete the project and create a print in time for Cannes. Tunnel Post, which now uses Chasing Ghosts as its calling card, created the proprietary workflow for the conform process.

The first film Jackson edited, Cats and Mice, was shot on Panasonic’s VariCam. The workflow, developed by Jackson with Jon Thorn of the DR Group, was fairly simple. "Everything was converted to DVCAM and brought in via my PowerBook and a Sony DSR-11 DVCAM deck," Jackson recalls. "We cut it in Final Cut Pro, and then for the online we just took my EDL to Jon’s HD bay and recaptured the show from the original tapes. We did the first pass of color correction with Final Cut Pro and then later did a tape-to-tape color correction."

But when Jackson and Pao were figuring out how to finish Chasing Ghosts, they were dealing with a Super 35 shoot, a shortened schedule and a budgetary crunch. "This time I was directing, writing and editing, so it was a little more intense," Jackson explains. "We went with film instead of HD because we didn’t have the time to test and develop our look. We wanted to shoot in 2.35:1, and we also needed the grain structure for the grit value it added to our film noir mood. So we decided to shoot on Kodak stock and telecine our dailies to DVCAM for the edit."

They knew they wanted a digital intermediate to help refine that noir look, but had written it off as an impossibly expensive luxury. According to Tunnel Post’s Donovan Eberling, technical engineer, established DI houses quoted prices ranging from $160,000 to $300,000. "There was just no possible way for the money to stretch," Jackson recalls. "[Bids from] Efilm, IO Film, Matchframe, Technicolor and everyone else were way out of the ballpark. We needed to come in about 25 to 30 percent less than the lowest anyone was willing to go." Instead, Jackson was planning to use the CCE process at Deluxe to get a bleach-bypass look.

Once the film got into post, Jackson and Pao realized that, in terms of the individual components of the process, a DI was again starting to look affordable. And Thorn wanted to investigate a new 2K finishing product from Silicon Color. Wheels started turning. "As a whole, with one service company, [a DI] was still prohibitive," he says. "So [in October 2004] we started piecing together how we could go from Final Cut to a DI workflow on the Mac."

"We crafted the first workflow path from Final Cut Pro to a 2K pin-registered scanner and from there back to the Mac, where all the color-grading, VFX, dust-busting and conforming was done. What a whirlwind it has been."

Editing from DVCAM was a money-saver, and once Jackson and Pao decided on a desktop DI, they had to find other ways to cut corners without sacrificing quality. "A lot of companies were offering an HD DI solution that was really nothing more than an HD online that is printed to film," said Jackson. "That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to us since we had gone as far as to shoot Super 35. Our cost-saving solution was to start with cutting the reel count down, since all the scanning has built in charges for the number of reels. So instead of loading up and cleaning 140 reels from the film to the scanner, we cut it down to about 35 to 40."

The negative for each shot used in the film was cut from head slate to roll-out, cutting the 140 reels of exposed negative down to fewer than 40 for scanning purposes. (According to Tunnel Post’s Eberling, the decision to cut the negative had ramifications later in the post process, where dust-busting accounted for a large part of the overall finishing costs.)

Using CinemaTools, the Final Cut EDL was translated into a film cut list and scanner pull list that was programmed into the Imagica Imager XE scanner at Lowry Digital. Shots were scanned at 2K; some were scanned at 4K, with the intention of zooming in and reframing the shot, to preserve resolution. Once those shots were reframed, they were saved at 2K. During color correction, the full-aperture images were cropped to 2.35:1.

Jackson says the FinalTouch 2K system came a long way as he worked on his film, but also notes that this workflow is very much a work in progress. "The DI process is still a long way from being something that every film should go through," he says. "If the DI process was anywhere close to the workflow for HD, it would be hugely beneficial. Being in the 2K color space is just great, but it is badly lacking in standards for scanning and conforming. To me it seems like there are a couple of obvious ways to improve things- but getting everyone to agree is a whole other problem."

While the benefits are great, Jackson stressed that the desktop workflow is best thought of as an alternative for savvy tech-heads who aren’t afraid of a DIY DI. "It requires a lot of post-production and computer-programming experience to make sure that everything will sync from end to end. Unless you have that experience, or can afford to pay a service bureau to do the work, then I think it is quite dangerous for other films to take the DI process on as we did," he said.

"We pulled off a full 2K DI for $110K, about $50K less than the lowest bid that we received," says Kyle Jackson.

Credits:
Director/editor/co-writer: Kyle Dean Jackson
Producer/co-writer: Alan Pao
Co-producers: Brian Hartman, Ari Palitz, Gareth West

Tunnel Post:
Technical Engineer: Donovan Eberling
Consultants: Lowell Kay, Roland Wood
VFX Supervisor: Tim Carras
Colorist: Teague Cowley
Shake artists: Rooth Tang, Adam Georgian, Kenneth Armstrong, Donovan Eberling