American Cinematographer - February 2008 - (Page 40) Checking Dailies Far From the Lab Right: One of Beato’s stills from Dark Water. While filming the thriller in Toronto in 2004, the cinematographer beta-tested Look Manager, generating paper prints of his stills for the timer at Deluxe Laboratories. Below: The color-calibrated chart Beato developed with Marcelo Siqueira, ABC, a visual-effects supervisor in Brazil. using with its GUI (graphical user interface) to control software in the DI suite. The colorist I was working with, Asa Shoul, advocated the monitor for its quality and affordability. I acquired one to use on Love in the Time of Cholera, and I’ve used it ever since. The UltraSharp permits gain, contrast, hue and RGB calibrations in a 50-point scale, with two clicks between each number. It has a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels and DVD-I, S-video, composite and component inputs; it is lightweight and well designed. Sound speakers are optional. The calibration is achieved with a sensor that is placed on the monitor and driven by Kodak Display Manager (running on your computer). Upon analyzing the production schedule for Love in the Time of Cholera, I realized I wouldn’t have time to carry around a digital stills camera and capture the proper frame for each scene, given that we had many scenes to film and not much time to do it. So we advertised for an assistant, thinking the job might appeal to a Colombian film student with an interest in cinematography. We hired one who proved to be very valuable to achiev- ing our goal. The assistance of an intern is fundamental to the use of Look Manager. Most of the cinematographers I’ve spoken to about the system say they abandoned it because they didn’t have time to operate it. From another perspective, an intern who is given the opportunity to work side-by-side with the director of photography without being involved in the hard work of the camera assistants might view it as a privilege, a unique way to learn the craft under the eye of a professional. I have encouraged Kodak’s software managers to offer more Look Manager training at film schools, and they are currently doing that. For our digital stills camera on Love in the Time of Cholera, we used a Nikon D100 with an f3.5 Nikon zoom. (Slower lenses do not transmit detail in the shadow area as well as lenses with more luminosity.) After capturing images from each scene, the intern would hand me the camera’s memory chip, and I would download it to my computer at an improvised office in the house I was renting. Using Look Manager and the calibrated monitor, I would correct the images and apply aesthetic values to each scene to be sent to the colorist in London. The corrected images, then in DPX file format, were put in a 2GB flash drive and 40 February 2008
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