Color Space at the Academy – Part 3

Ray Feeney, founder of RFX in Hollywood, has been watching the struggle for color standards from the position of chair of the Academy’s Science & Technology Council, which is made up of 25 of the Academy’s senior technologists, and chair of the Advanced Technologies program. He recently returned from a conference of the Society for Imaging Science & Technology, a group primarily concerned with aspects of color management for the graphic arts and still photography.

RAY FEENEY: There’s more overlap now that we as an industry are looking at digital color management for digital cinema. We’re going to these organizations with particular levels of expertise and seeing what aspects of what they do can be incorporated into our set of needs. We don’t need to reinvent everything. We can adapt proven technologies to the motion picture industry, something we’ve done for years.

Probably the most significant is looking at next-generation mastering and trying to come up with standards for the way DIs are done. There are two aspects to it. One is next generation mastering, which involves a format and a standard.

The Academy is interested in the digital equivalent of the negative. DCI (the Digital Cinema Initiative) stipulated that there is a “Digital Source Master.” All their work starts there. But they don’t define what that is. The Academy is looking to define the specifics of the Digital Source Master.

The problem of digital archive is totally up in the air. We don’t have a magic wand to wave in front of that. Once the Digital Source Master is defined, we can next have the industry think about this. It’s hard to set up procedures to archive until you have standards.

It produces a set of files for which there isn’t a good unified standard for archive. Now they record the output of the DI to both a film negative and also typically make a digital 3-color separation to put away. All this is fine, because we know that film stored correctly has an archival life of 100 years or more. But it’s unclear whether the infrastructure of film will continue to exist when there is very little consumer market for film. We’re not predicting the end of film, but we have to look at the “what if.”

I don’t know. The ideal archival mechanism is the “born archival.” Film is that. As soon as it’s processed, it’s in an archival form. You don’t have to dupe it or make decisions about what to keep or what not to keep.

Today, you have to make a conscious decision of what to put away and it requires a copy step to be archival. The ideal situation would be if digital capture on the set were recorded in some manner that was archive-able without having to go through additional steps. But there’s nothing like that on the horizon at the moment.

Standardizing the output is very different from standardizing the mechanism by which you get to the output. There is plenty of room for proprietary advantage, and skill and science to differentiate one facility from another.

But when you’re all done making the image the way it’s supposed to look, anybody ought to be able to play it back. The digital bits that make up the image should be unambiguous wherever they are.

It took DCI four years to get it on the output side. I’m hoping we don’t take any longer than that. We’re 18 months into the process, and if all goes well, we have less than 24 months to go. If you look at DCI as a success story, if we can do it as straightforwardly as they did, I’ll be happy.

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– Click here to read Part 2 of Color Space at the Academy, which features Andy Maltz, director of the Science and Technology Council.

– Click here to read Part 1 of Color Space at the Academy, which details the history that led up to the establishment of the Advanced Technology Committee of the Academy's Science and Technology Council.