Metadata on My Mind

According to cinematographer Curtis Clark, speaking at the American Society of Cinematographers’ panel on this year’s pre-NAB Digital Cinema Summit, “we have almost all the major [color-correction system] vendors on board” with the ASC CDL, or color decision list, which codifies some basic color-grading decisions so they can be maintained throughout production and post. The new question, then, is what’s the next step?

As usual, cinematographer David Stump, who recently worked on the Viper-shot TV miniseries The Bronx is Burning with cinematographer Doug Koch, had some ideas. On Bronx, the Viper recorded to an HDCAM SRW-1 deck on set, with Cinetal and eCinema displays for monitoring. As on the feature film What Love Is, Stump made use of Grass Valley LUTher boxes to set looks during production. In all, he said, about 68 specific looks, and LUTs, were created for different scenes in the project. The process worked – Stump said that by the end of the series’ production, episodes that were budgeted to spend 20 hours in color-correction only required a fraction of that length – but it underscored the need for an automatic system to correctly pass metadata from production to post.

“This process needs to be automated all through the pipeline,” Stump said. “I propose the ASC LUT – a standardization of the syntax in which LUTs are shipped from one machine to another. [Currently,] none of them have the same header information and syntax.”

Laser Pacific’s Glenn Kennel indicated a less-than-complete level of satisfaction with the current state of picture calibration across digital post. The images seen on the set and in post, he said, “have to be as trustworthy as film used to be …. Quite frankly, they need to have, if not a film level of quality, at least digital-cinema levels of quality.” Consistency throughout the pipeline is important, as is clear communication, he said, indicating that using the CDL as “a common basis” for everyone in the process is a step in the right direction.

As an example of cooperation among vendors, Filmlight was at NAB showing a workflow that maintained the ASC CDL metadata from a Grass Valley Spirit film scanner (and Bones dailies platform) through an Avid Media Composer Adrenaline editorial session and into a Filmlight DI suite. (Avid's CDL support will be enabled in June, Filmlight said.) But the CDL isn't quite a slam-dunk – yet.

Quantel, which announced new offline-to-online AAF interchange tools earlier this year (see F&V's coverage here), expressed some reservations about making way for a new type of metadata. "Yes, we plan to support the ASC CDL," Mark Horton, marketing manager for post, told Film & Video in response to a question at the Quantel booth. "We are slightly concerned that it doesn't have anything to do with AAF. Are we going to have two competing metadata formats? It would be really nice if the AAF guys and the ASC guys came together so that everyone could play nice with each other."

Back at the panel discussion, Post Logic Colorist Lou Levinson stressed the importance of dailies, noting that if those are good enough, the rest of the DI process tends to go smoothly. He did note that there are still surprises in the DI, such as focus misses that aren’t detected during production even on decent HD displays. He also noted an experience with an unnamed client who went hog-wild experimenting with speed changes that looked awesome on a computer monitor but “ridiculous” on a 20-foot-wide screen. “It will probably be a while before we go to an all-digital display environment,” Levinson said. “At some point, you’re back to the photochemical land of film.”

Near the end of the panel discussion, Clark described a new relationship between the ASC and the Art Directors Guild [ADG] that seeks to see how the process can be improved by taking a serious look at color in the previs and set-design stages. “If we start working together, we can blend [our talents] in a way that helps us get back to the art form,” he said. The ADG Technology Committee is headed by Alex McDowell (read F&V’s interview with McDowell on working with cinematographer Benoit Delhomme on Breaking and Entering here).