Bleeding-Edge Technology on the Digital Cinema Front

The razzle-dazzle at the two-day Digital Cinema Summit directly
preceding NAB in Las Vegas may have been the shockingly good 3D
processes that were showcased – and keynoter James Cameron's fervent
belief (read
our coverage here) that they're going to help
reinvigorate the exhibition industry – but the brass tacks involved the
impact of digital-cinema distribution on traditional post-production
facilities.

Jim Whittlesey (pictured above), speaking for Deluxe Digital Media in Burbank, which has finished two 4K projects and just started a third, warned that post
facilities need to pay attention to the details, at least until digital
cinema workflows are stabilized. “DI facilities tend to concentrate on
image, but in this new world, we’re going to have to pay more attention
to ,” Whittlesey said, noting that a majority of the audio files
he received on one recent project were out of compliance with DCI
specs, which are the law of the land in D-Cinema territory. “This stuff
is all very leading-edge, and almost beta. You want to understand the
peculiarities.”

And Whittlesey also warned against underestimating the demands of
JPEG2000 encoding – he said Deluxe is able to encode at only about two
frames per second. Time is also at a premium on the film-scanning side,
noted Stuart Monksfield, workflow manager at Grass Valley/Thomson in
Wieterstadt, Germany. With 4K film scans running at about 7.5 frames
per second, the process is still much too slow to turn around dailies –
meaning that, for the forseeable future, facilities will continue
scanning film once for dailies and again, at full-resolution, closer to
the end of post.

In response to an audience question about scanning film at 4K in order
to make a better 2K deliverable, Terry Brown, senior VP of engineering
and CTO of Technicolor Content Services in New York, said the industry
is far from consensus on the advantages of 4K. “The 4K/2K issue is
religion,” he said, going on to note that in a 4K scan, for one thing,
“the grain is sharper than what you’ve seen before.”

Cinematographers, of course, had a strong voice during the Summit.
Daryn Okada gave a presentation featuring projected footage from a
camera field test he did for Disney using the Arri D20, the Sony
HDW-F950, the Dalsa Origin, the Viper, and Kodak Vision2 5218 Super 35
stock. (It wasn’t a shoot-out, so Okada didn’t spend time making
comparisons between the formats.) And cinematographer Curtis Clark
discussed a car-commercial shoot using the Panavision Genesis. “The
problem was really the contrast,” he said, noting the wide dynamic
range of the exteriors he was shooting. “The waveform becomes my
exposure meter.” He said digital cameras are still experiencing a “fair
amount of resistance” in the commercial world because of a lack of
variable frame rates on the cameras.

David Stump described the workflow on What Love Is,
which he shot with four Vipers recording to SR tape using LUTher boxes
to determine printer lights on set. (For more details on that project,
see our
March 1 report from Grass Valley’s pre-NAB press event in Palm Springs,
CA) Clark articulated one of the main questions
surrounding that type of workflow in the Q&A after the session,
when he wondered aloud, “If you use one of these applications for look
management on set, will the information be transferrable to the DI when
that happens?” The ostensible solution, of course, is the ASC’s color
decision list, which should help make that process
work.

Finally, cinematographer Thomas Ackerson described his experience using
the Genesis on Scary Movie 4, and included some
musings on “retaining authorship” of digitally acquired material
through the post process. He called on cinematographers to retain “a
certain authority on not only how we shoot, but how it’s handled in the
post-production workflow.”

With all the chatter about 3D, there were obvious questions about
handling that material in post. As part of a roundtable session, James
Cameron said when he’s shooting 3D he looks at a HD monitor on set,
likes to have a small 3D viewing system at an engineering station or at
the production’s video village, and prefers to have full 2K projection
somewhere near the set. As far as recording the simultaneous signal
from two HDCAMs (which is the rig Cameron uses), the choice seems to be
between recording two 4:2:2 streams to a single deck, or using two
decks both running in 4:4:4 mode.

Cameron claimed he’s seen “almost no difference” between 4:4:4 and
4:2:2 for compositing purposes. “When I shoot my next movie,” he said,
“I’m not going to use 4:4:4 because I want to record dual-stream to the
SR deck.”